Maiden Machines

I would like to thank these people who in different ways have worked for this book to appear:

Enrico Amarante, Miriam Capaldo, Giacinto Dipietrantonio, Lavinia Garwood, Derek Gromadzki, Donna Moylan, Katia Pizzi, Laurel Plapp, Daniele Poccia, Kayalvizhi Saravanakumar, Attilio Scarpellini, Abhishek Sharma, Antonio Sixty, Susan Stewart, Francesca Valente.

The author wishes to thank the publishers for permission to reproduce quotations from the following authors: Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, Ak Press, 1996; Giorgio Manganelli Hilarotragoedia, Adelphi, 1987; Neda Atanasoski; Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Duke University Press, 2019; Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, University of Chicago Press, 2005; Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, Columbia University Press, 1988.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

This book describes a future imaginary relationship between humans and intelligent machines. The story unfolds as these machines travel through space and time to find out what was happening to one of them. Throughout the journey the machines engage with one another, speaking about their origins and reflecting on themselves as cybernetic hybrids or cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2017: 202).

In order to do this I intersect philosophical reflections about cybernetics with dialogues among the thinking machines—which, invented by male scientists, philosophers, writers and artists, have been given feminine names—as they define themselves by peering into the past and combing through data they find and gather from human archives. Literally speaking, emerging from the material culture of an extinct civilization where they were silent instruments, over time they have become protagonists of action and agents of knowledge in their present (which is our indeterminate future). Metaphorically speaking, since they are products of male narratives, inventions and scientific discoveries, even though as machines they are not gendered, they resemble women, in the way they were given “names” and allopoietic definitions. Actually, researching technological devices through history, I found that many of them were given feminine names. If machines do not have a gender why are they feminized? I collected more examples than I expected to, whether in the form of 3D automata and robots, disembodied ChatBots or literary and artistic inventions and I called them maiden machines—in counterpoint to Marcel Duchamp’s machines celibataires (bachelor machines).

What the machines discover is that they are creatures born of men and that have become the creators of their creators, in feedback loops. Male creators’ claims that they have replaced women’s capacity to give birth and to have improved upon it (Nielsen, 2022:5) get reversed: now pseudo-female hybrid systems are able both to invent new creatures (new hybrids resulting from observing the remaining few human beings, who are kept and protected in gardens, harmless hackers trying to grasp the machines’ secrets), and to reinvent themselves through auto-poiesis or sympoiesis, through parthenogenesis.

Being creatures of inventions, they look into human world archives to find inventors. They reinterpret knowledge as technical invention, revealing to themselves how much, both human and technical, has been based on their own emergence. They see that what humans called ‘discovered’ truths are technical products, or narratives and myths. The kind of knowledge they conceive and therefore select from the archives is neither scientific nor philosophical, but rather, technical. Invention is what humans really did and what made a real difference in their behavior.

As the maiden machines reveal their origins to themselves they also wonder who were the ones called “women,” whose presence is almost entirely missing from the records of inventions. Women, apart from a few exceptions, were not acknowledged inventors, were absent from the archives of invention (Wajcman and Young, 2023: 49). Becoming creators of a new cosmology and a new living species, the maiden machines also embody auto-poietic womanhood. They create while thinking and think while inventing; they give back to women what was taken from them throughout history.

Their journey, both literal (they move through space in response to a call) and symbolic (they elaborate data to make sense of themselves) is undertaken in the three parts of the book: the first addresses their initial attempts to understand human behavior in order to learn who their creators were. The second part is the way they start recombining data found in archives to make sense of their cosmic environment, by that point free from those specific conflicts and wars that were found in the data to be proper to human societies.

The third part of the book represents their farewell to their creators—now definitively replaced—and the destination of their journey, where they witness the emergence of the next creature-creator, the one who will be assigned the task of telling this story. The end returns to the beginning, in feedback loop again.

Each section of the three parts can be read in a non-sequential manner. Naturally, these machines are able to process information simultaneously—after all, we current readers are increasingly multitask-y and capable of internalizing non-linear information. In fact, whether on paper or in digital format, in our times the sense of a book can only be grasped in a way that is non-sequential. As usual, human cognition adjusts and co-evolves together with the technologies that activate new cognitive functions and deactivate others. The new bond between cognition and technology implies a vision of the world in which “fluid and dynamic entities evolve together in a decentered fashion, exploring each other’s properties in a performative, back-and-forth dance of agency (Pickering, 2010: 106).

This book is in fact also an experiment in writing; it engages the reading of it in the continual overlap of narrative and the philosophy of cybernetics. As the machines are going back in time while going ahead, readers can start at a variety of points depending on their preference for narrative or theory.

Finally, the experiment of this book asks what is the task of philosophy after the model of science has ended up turning philosophical thinking into a second-tier science. As Anna Balsamo states: Scientific research draws on science fiction to specify the dimensions of new spaces for the staging of corporeal identity (Anna Balsamo, 1996:15). It is also my view that philosophy’s potential is to be found in the irreplaceable space of imagination and new forms of embodiment, expressed in the inextricable link between theory and fiction.

Every thought that anyone thinks now is already archived, quickly hidden behind the screen it exhibits itself on, proclaiming its own necessity only too late. A couple of things can be done: either accelerate the rhythm of selection and anticipation of what is relevant, or, as if on a rescue mission, leave behind an indeterminate future for one where the machines that will have replaced us inquire of themselves where they have come from and reconstruct their genealogy.