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Posthuman Care and the Alterity of Digital Human in Marjorie Prime

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2023, 36(2), pp.61-89
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama
  • Received : July 30, 2023
  • Accepted : August 7, 2023
  • Published : August 31, 2023

Yeoniee Cho 1

1서울과학기술대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Featuring the Prime—a sophisticated AI hologram caregiver—as its novum, Marjorie Prime serves as a laboratory for interdisciplinary research in which fictional representations of AI can reversely contribute to the digital caregiving technology, thereby feeding the critical discourse about AI and the human-machine relationship. Engaging with the discontinuity between the representation of less-than-human AIs in Act 1 and Act 2 and the SF clichéd horror of the eventual replacement of humans by machines in Act 3, this article analyzes how as an allegory of humanlike AI, Marjorie Prime discloses and re-imagines the alterity of AI. If the Primes are othered as less-than-human beings in Act 1 and Act 2, they have their species established as an other in Act 3. Oscillating between the anthropocentrism rooted in the human-machine relationship and the more-than-human relationship between human and digital human, Marjorie Prime examines how the Primes might be doubly othered as digital human caregivers and at the same time offered an opportunity to address their silenced needs for autonomy within the discourse of caregiving.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.