READING CYBERPUNK IN THE AGE OF AI

These narratives have influenced serious thinking around robotics, neural interfaces, and identity.

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SOCIETY, Richard K. Morgan once observed, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by willful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the majority whom the system oppresses. In Altered Carbon (2002), that observation becomes existential. Consciousness turns into software, bodies into disposable hardware, and artificial intelligence is no longer an external threat but an internal condition. Humans become programmable.

The term ‘cyberpunk’, coined by Bruce Bethke in 1982, fused cybernetics with punk’s anti-establishment spirit. The genre’s roots lie in the New Wave science fiction of the 1960s and ’70s. Writers like Philip K. Dick interrogated reality itself, exposing the moral cost of progress, as did William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, his cinematic adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? These works imagined futures where technology did not save humanity but amplified its contradictions.