Dystopian Dreams, Utopian Nightmares: AI and the Permanence of Racism by Chaz Arnett :: SSRN
This Essay draws connections between Octavia Butler’s Parable series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), HBO’s Westworld, and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism to highlight how the reconfiguration and transmutation of race through technological change is facilitated by corresponding shifts in legal doctrine, theory, policy, and practice. It takes the overlapping threads from these three sources, which struggle with the idea of change within larger systems of unavoidable, repetitive destruction, and ties them to the law’s role in helping to shield race through the storms of change by being similarly nimble, flexible, and perseverant. The Essay identifies a theme found in both the selected Afrofuturistic works and in tech-centered legal doctrine, regulation, and theory that illuminate the law’s role in reconstituting the fraught relationship between race and technology: the promise of utopia. The Essay explores this concept in the con
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