Android Memoirs – An Envision of the Future

By John Gerard Fagan

If the world somehow survives all the shite humans are doing to it just now – we don’t destroy the rainforests, fuck up the oceans beyond repair with plastic waste, eat all the fish and other defenceless animals, and create more deadly viruses that wipe us all out, then maybe, just maybe Artificial Intelligence will develop enough capacity to give us android writers who would open up a whole new level in the literary canon.

Yes there are novels, stories, and songs in existence today that were written by AI, and This Artwork Does Not Exist already has brilliant paintings done solely by AI, but what I am particularly interested in here is an AI that is a complete entity into itself and, while capable of a variety of fiction writing would be brilliant, one that is able to write a memoir about its own life would be the capacity to aim for.

Having just gone through the process myself writing my own memoir, Fish Town (2021), it is a lot different to writing a novel or a short story and in a lot of ways more complex, as you are mirroring the truth of the past with an imperfect memory. I lived in a Japanese village and felt, and was sometimes treated, like a Xenomorph that boarded his very own Nostromo, but my memoir about a stranger in a strange land is all together very human. An android would not only give us a completely different insight into another form of existence in the world from that of a human, and span far longer periods of time, but their memories would also be perfect. There would therefore be no grey areas and we would have access to something we have never had before. They could even come up with many new and creative ways in how to

write memoirs. I wrote Fish Town on my phone in free form with fragmented sentences, but an AI could give us a real taste of the avant-garde that is still readable and accessible on whatever devices we will be reading on in the future.

The possibilities in this field are endless for non-fiction books. We could have an astronaut android programmed with Kerouac’s style write a memoir about their solo space mission towards a black hole, a Bukowski-esque android living in the Antarctica writing about life in an Antarctica post office over hundreds of years, or even something like a droid programmed like C-3PO writing a memoir about living as a butler to generations of families.

This would not and should not be limited to humanoid androids – animal droids of all kinds could be designed and sent to live in the wild and give us richer insights of these worlds. Me Cheeta (2009) gave us a fictionalised autobiography written by a famous movie star chimpanzee who starred in several Tarzan movies; something that is fascinating but sadly impossible in reality. But an android could be able to do this for real. We could get massive insights into the lives of sea creatures. For example, a dolphin memoir told by an android dolphin who looks and acts like a dolphin but can communicate back to us this existence of living in a pod out in the Atlantic Ocean. Or even a honey badger memoir about its life fighting deadly snakes and generally not giving a fuck – that is a best-seller right there.

While the hat given to Guenter the monkey in Futurama (1999-2013), which makes it super intelligent and possess a human level of self-reflective consciousness, could be a possibility too and animals like Cheeta the Chimp of the future could possibly tell us about their lives via this method, I’m betting on the androids getting there first. And it would avoid any

malevolent animal testing, which would no doubt have to happen with an intelligence device of that kind.

If we make it to this kind of envisioned android future, where androids are used in beneficial literary ways, not as a T-1000 from the Terminator 2 (1991) film or the Nexus-6 in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), then people should not be afraid of AI writing replacing them. The human memoir will always remain popular as, unlike the android kind, will be relatable on a level that cannot be replicated and can guide people through journeys they might take themselves in the future, or simply provide a mode of escapism. Androids could benefit literature and their memoirs will just add depth to the genre. If this ever happens, I hope it would be embraced.

Bio: My name is John Gerard Fagan. I am a Scottish writer and author of Fish Town, a memoir about living in Japan. I want to explore the possibility of humanoid androids adding to the literary cannon by writing their own memoirs and take it further with the idea of what animal androids could bring to the table too.