Kristiana Filipov
Skinjobs, Sexbots, and Smart Machines: A Taxonomy of Artificial Intelligences
The lecture will also be broadcast live on Zoom. To watch online, please register here: Zoom registration
When Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned his post on September 9th, 2026, he explained in a Twitter thread that he and his colleagues “earnestly believe that [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.” With this warning, Coxon fixed the brightest spotlight yet on anxieties that the current breakneck pace of AI development will doom our species. In the weeks since, thinkpieces have swarmed around whether humanity is prepared to face this emerging threat. But an underlying question seems curiously unaddressed: why, exactly, do we think intelligent AI would want to kill us?
One answer: because we have been told it would long before LLMs came into existence. Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, humans have been telling stories about our creations turning on us. These narratives have shaped attitudes, anxieties, and even technological developments for over two centuries now, and they demand closer attention as robots, androids, and intelligent machines begin to emerge from speculation into reality.
Kristiana Filipov is the recipient of the 2026 Einstein Fellowship. She earned her BA in German at Princeton University with a certificate in Humanistic Studies. She then completed an M. Phil in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, where she received the Peter Irons Studentship and was awarded the inaugural Gerald Dawe dissertation prize for her research on Irish women’s writing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. When Kristiana is not residing at Albert Einstein’s summer house in Caputh, she is based in Philadelphia.
Eine Kooperation mit der Wittenstein Stiftung, Igersheim