AI and Human Emotion: Ethical Dilemmas in Recent Dystopian Novels
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Human Emotion, Dystopian Literature, Ethical Dilemmas, PosthumanismAbstract
More and more, new dystopian books look at how artificial intelligence (AI) and human emotions interact. This brings up difficult ethics questions about identity, liberty, and sensitivity in societies that are influenced by technology. This essay looks into how modern future fiction shows the moral problems that come up when AI gets involved with human emotions. This study looks at how narrative strategies are used to question the lines between human and machine emotional experience by analysing important works like Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021), Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries (2017–2020), and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice (2013). The study uses ethical theory, philosophy of mind, and female technology studies to show how these books question common ideas about moral duty, empathy, and free will. The paper uses a qualitative, interpretive approach that combines close reading with ethical analysis to show how future stories make it harder for people to deal with their feelings when AI comes along. The results show that AI in these stories often tries to take away real emotional connection, but it also creates new ways to think about ethics in a posthuman age. This study adds to current academic discussions about technology, emotion, and ethics. It shows how important writing is for dealing with new moral problems caused by AI.
References
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
Brown, J. (2021). Autonomy and affect in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Science Fiction Studies, 48(2), 201–220.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2010). Robot rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration. Ethics and Information Technology, 12(3), 209–221.
Davis, J. (2018). Justice and affect in Ancillary Justice. Feminist Science Fiction Review, 22(1), 77–94.
Gunkel, D. J. (2018). Robot Rights. MIT Press.
Haraway, D. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 15(2), 65–108.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press.
Held, V. (2006). The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford University Press.
Hursthouse, R. (1999). On Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.
Ishiguro, K. (2021). Klara and the Sun. Alfred A. Knopf.
Jones, M. (2015). Posthuman identity and ethics in Ancillary Justice. Science Fiction and Culture, 19(4), 322–338.
Leckie, A. (2013). Ancillary Justice. Orbit.
Lee, M. (2023). Simulated empathy in Klara and the Sun. Studies in the Novel, 55(1), 45–63.
McKibbin, T. (2022). The limits of feeling: AI empathy and reading affect in Klara and the Sun. Contemporary Literature Review, 8(3), 110–127.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457.
Smith, A. (2019). AI irony and affect in Martha Wells’ Murderbot. Journal of Sci-Fi Critique, 12(1), 22–36.
Wallach, W., & Allen, C. (2009). Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong. Oxford University Press.
Wells, M. (2017–2020). The Murderbot Diaries series. Tor.com.
Published on:
Also Available On
Note: Third-party indexing sometime takes time. Please wait one week or two for indexing. Validate this article's Schema Markup on Schema.org
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Esraa Taher Matrood (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
