Tok Thompson is a folklorist. He studies ghost stories and games and traditional music: the things we share in our tribal cultural groups. Over the past two decades, the internet has given us an entirely new space in which to tell stories. Instead of fairytales, contemporary folklorists like Thompson unpack memes and internet legends.
Thompson calls this growing area of study “cyborg” folklore, because such relatively new technologies as social media and artificial intelligence (A.I.) are more than toys and tools. He believes they’re actually now grafted onto our individual and societal psyches in powerful discernable ways.
His new book, “Posthuman Folklore,” argues that artificial intelligence and our growing scientific knowledge of non-human animals challenge our notion of what it means to be a “person.” Folklore, he thinks, is evolving to reflect this.
In this Ampersand Q&A, Thompson, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, with a joint position in the anthropology and communications departments, talks about the growth of cyborg ghost stories, the future of A.I. folklore, and what it means to be human on a threatened planet.
Early on in your book you mention that one thing that distinguishes us from non-human animals is the ability to tell stories.
As far as we can tell we seem to be the only animal to tell stories. That’s kind of a key point, because I think it explains a lot of human culture. We love stories.
So what happens when an Android [a robot with AI] or another AI can tell stories?
It’s already happening. You know Alexa is telling stories to kids right? We used to worry about kids being raised by TV and now researchers are a little worried about kids being raised by Alexa. Alexa doesn’t just find something that was printed and read it, unless you ask it for that. In general, it does what Google Translate does, which is aggregate several stories and create a composite. That’s interesting because that’s how human folklore works. That’s how that’s how we tell stories.
There’s going to be a lot of new stories, new ghosts. There’s going to be all these new ways that we’re trying to figure out and muck through what’s happening to us because we’re radically transforming in one generation or less.
There’s this concept of cyborg that we have in our heads of something like the Terminator, this dude with a machine skeleton –
Sure. But then again when I think “cyborg”, I also think of the fact that I kind of panic when I’m not within five feet of my phone, right?
Right. And then there’s this concept of folklore that’s like: Paul Bunyan, the Brothers Grimm, all these old stories. You write a lot about these two terms marrying together.
Go to the American Folklore Society website and probably about one-third of the papers are on internet folklore. It’s just a huge genre. Think of stories like Slenderman. We’ve had monsters before, but this is a sort of internet-native monster. It says a lot about people’s experiences with the online realm.
I teach a class on ghost stories and I make students collect ghost stories, and increasingly they’ve collected these sort of cyborg ghost stories. So, you know, text messages from The Beyond, and haunted servers. The internet has become haunted. It’s become a place of graveyards.
What happens when you die? What happens to your Facebook page? For the most part it stays up unless somebody takes it down. People tend to still be friends with you, right? It’s considered a bit rude to de-friend someone just because they died. It quickly creates a curious sort of online afterlife.
Do these ghost stories come from people’s actual experiences or are they things people make up to cope? How does a ghost story come to life?
Well, there could be all of it. You have the personal experiences. You have traditions of explanation and popular culture. These things can all work together. When people have individual experiences that are difficult to explain, they very often turn to a traditional explanation.
So, there are these sort of human social media ghosts, but you also talk in your book about the possibility of AI and Android ghost stories in the future.
I wanted to think of folklore with a futurist perspective. You know, in other disciplines, like economics, they make predictions all the time, so why can’t I do that?
The idea is that once you put artificial intelligence in a robot [making an Android] we personalize a lot more, especially if it’s a person-looking robot. We build Androids to be socially significant to us.
Android technology is running off the conveyor belts, but the ethical rules aren’t there. Is it okay to beat your Android to death? Is it okay to buy sex Androids and abuse them? Is it okay to have Androids fight each other to the death? There are no guidelines for this.
We could treat them as machines. Maybe you want beat your car up. Okay, it’s up to you, it’s your car. But if you turn around and someone’s beating something that looks like a person, and the guy is smashing him into the ground and the Android is saying, “Please Bob, help me! Somebody help me!” that’s going to affect us in a way that I think pushes those ethical questions right to the foreground.
Just last year there was a guy in Texas who announced he was going to open a robot brothel. Everybody got really upset and said, “There’s got to be a law against that!” But what would that law say? That’s where the problem comes in. We don’t have any ethical systems in place.
Ghost stories in general reveal ethical lapses. Why does a ghost haunt? Well, usually some wrong has been done. If we don’t figure out how to deal with Androids ethically, we will be haunted by their ghosts in the future.
Do all these changes worry you?
The thing that worries me most is the Anthropocene [what some academics call our current geological epoch, to account for human impact on the planet Earth]. We’re sort of diving off of this sustainability cliff. We’re investing so much time and effort into the cyborg quality and into building Androids. It seems to be running away from accepting our biological ontology.
Interesting. The Transhumanist movement is built around this idea of being able to upload your consciousness into a server. Is this the same sort of running away?
Yeah. We have this idea — can we escape our biological reality? I don’t think we can. If the trees disappear off the planet Earth we’re not going to breathe for very long.
It doesn’t matter how many Androids you have.
Right, it doesn’t matter how many Androids or avatars you’re going to have out there if you can’t breathe. Again, it’s about ontology. Who am I? I tend to think of trees as my other lungs. I breathe out, they breathe in. There’s a back and forth. I couldn’t live without them. So are they not a part of me?
Escape is fantasy. This idea of aliens, that we’re going to travel to a different planet and colonize another planet, I really don’t think that’s feasible. It’s also a sort of running away, from what I would say are our ethical responsibilities as earthlings. Rather than dealing with the planet Earth we’re always looking for somewhere else. We spend far more on exploring Mars than we do on exploring the bottom of the ocean. I think that’s ridiculous.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.