We know a plethora of technological artefacts that functioned as mascots for the times of their invention. Nuclear power in the 1950s USA, fuelled by the eerie technocratic fantasies, gave the name to the 'Atomic Age' with its promises of nuclear medicine and radioactive food. In the 1990-s, a similar mascot consisted of a DNA sequence, which induced dystopian fictions of human engineering and utopian cloning experiments. Today, we can see a comparable charge in the term 'Artificial Intelligence', which mobilises equally vivid aspirations and concerns. The cultural density that comprises the fabric of those mascots makes their unstitching an exhausting process. It feels awkward now to read about nuclear utopias or seriously consider the question 'Will there be another you?' posed by Time in a report on a Dolly sheep in 1997.

With this volume, we propose to bring such uneasiness to what we might understand as 'Artificial Intelligence'. Approaching artificial intelligence as a dense cultural relic, we suggest seeing a multitude of political layers that inform its emergence and impact that this notion bears on contemporary thought. We interrogate the synthetic nature embedded in cognition, bringing forward the perspectives of those experienced in questioning fabricated norms associated with consciousness. With most knowledge production systems coded counterfeit by Western science throughout its history, the contributors of this book analyse how artificial intelligence bears in itself the heritage and prospects of interspecies, crip, monstrous, feminist, distributed, and decolonial approaches, among others.

This volume examines processes and needs that make artificial intelligence a new cultural frontier in such persistent gatekeeping of authenticity and reason. To do so, it looks into the labour that has brought to life and sustained the machinic notion of artificial intelligence we deal with today. Shifting the perspective from intelligent machines as a given fact towards cultural machines as a practice of their making is a complicated but gratifying process. It presents artificial intelligence as a mechanism of sublimated meaning, magnifying existing technopolitical tensions and producing ones of its own, as did nuclear power or genetics. The density of connotations that these cultural mascots embody implies that they absorb and access a variety of issues unique in their range. They make up a potential environment for interdisciplinary expertise rarely possible in less contested subjects.

We construct such an environment as a glossary. Current knowledge systems are specialised to the extent of operating through localised turns instead of scientific revolutions or paradigm shifts. A glossary format hosts a scale necessary for discussing central concepts associated with AI, such as algorithmic governance and automated agency, and notions related to 'artificiality' and 'intelligence'. This book, therefore, inherits the legacy of existing AI glossaries and maps while starting from a different entry point that takes the uneasiness with the term at its core approach. With this awkwardness, we propose a scope of associations that affirms and reflects the bulky nature of synthetic cognition.