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The Conversation
The Conversation
Xin Chen Cai, Teaching Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Modelling, University of Hull

How Shakespeare’s The Tempest can help readers understand the hidden costs of AI

A painting of Miranda, one of the characters in The Tempest, by Frederick Goodall (1888). Folger Shakespeare Library

In the 400 years since his death, William Shakespeare’s work has been used as a lens through which to interpret countless developments he could never have anticipated – from modern psychology and political theory to colonialism and climate change. His writing possesses an uncanny ability to illuminate nearly every facet of the human condition.

Yet, as a decolonial scholar and an AI researcher, we believe that Shakespeare’s plays are now beginning to illuminate something beyond that as well – the emergent forms of artificial intelligence that increasingly shape and challenge our understanding of what it means to think, act and be.

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