Stranger than Fiction: Artificial Intelligence, Media, and the Domestic Realm

Alan Kay’s famous soundbite from a 1971 Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) meeting presents a bizarre chicken and egg paradox. It goes like this: which came first, the science fiction representation of the objector the desire for specific objects themselves? In other words, is the plethora of technological advancements a direct result of anthropomorphic inevitabilities or are we simply trying to realize objects, vehicles, and environments we saw in science fiction representations in the mid-twentieth century? In this paper, I will argue that media and literature are equally as responsible as engineering for our current architectural reality. With the rise of Web 2.0, advances in graphics visualization, and their attendant cultural shifts, aspects of contemporary urban life increasingly resemble a science fiction. The pervasiveness of app culture and recent factual and fictional examples of artificial intelligence augmenting the built environment suggest that engineering advancements exist as part of a tight feedback loop between consumer expectations—largely influenced by Hollywood—and scientific discoveries. Therefore, in order to fully understand, historicise, or speculate on the future of interactions between humans and machines, we must first unpack the cycle of fiction-to-fact that typically occurs. Taking the domestic realm as an example, we can identify a series of uncanny, artificially intelligent, technologies which reflect human desires for subservience, assistance, and interconnectedness. Here, AI will serve as a case study through which to analyze the effect of fiction on scientific advancements and their subsequent dissemination into the consumer world, ultimately constituting a history based less on fact and more on media, image, and variable levels of reality.