Fifteen Questions: Leslie Fernandez on Techno-Orientalism, AI Ethics, and an Ethnic Studies Concentration

Leslie J. Fernandez is the Program Director for the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights and Lecturer of Asian American Studies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: What piqued your interest in AI and the intersection between technology and culture?

LJF: Growing up, I was a huge sci-fi fan from as young as I can remember. This is something I share in my classes. I’ve always felt like I related to robot characters or related to AI characters — and as I grew older, I started noticing that that was not necessarily a universal experience.

That’s actually something that really has driven my interest in trying to unpack and think about. Why do we have certain responses to AI? Why do we think about AI in certain ways? What is it that drives either an effective response or a more negative, visceral rejection when we experience these narratives?

FM: Is there a robot or AI character that you identify with?

LJF: Definitely — there’s a lot of them. I think one of my earliest experiences of really identifying with AI characters is “Blade Runner,” which is a film I teach a lot. And I definitely see myself a lot more in the androids that are being hunted than in Rick Deckard, who is the main character, right?

Maybe I don’t see myself in them as much, but I love characters like WALL-E and BMO in Adventure Time. I think cute robots are something I’ve always really been drawn to as well.

FM: What’s your favorite sci-fi?

LJF: Well, my favorite author is Philip K. Dick for sure. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” is maybe my all-time favorite book. I’ve read it countless times.

I love Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being.” That’s another book that I really enjoy a lot.

FM: Answer this however you want, but do androids dream of electric sheep?

LJF: Yes. I want to say yes. And I would say that to some extent, the message of the book is that ultimately, they are reflections of humanity. And if we dream of regular sheep, perhaps they dream of electric sheep.

FM: You teach a popular class on techno-orientalism — what exactly is that?

LJF: So techno-orientalism is this contemporary phenomenon that associates Asia and Asians with technology and futurity. You really see this in popular culture and cultural understandings of places like Japan or Korea and China as being sites of the future, of being more futuristic.

Techno-orientalism really covers this pretty wide range of this association of race and technology. But also futurity really is a big part of that. Both in terms of thinking about places — like Japan being the future, in a way where Japan is seen as this fascinating but strange type of futurity.

But you also have these negative fears of China being the future or threatening the future of the West. So it plays out in a lot of different ways. But this kind of preoccupation — what is the future, and whether Asia is the future — is one that is very prevalent in the discourse.

FM: Do you feel like there’s a trend towards humanities scholars trying to relate their fields to AI?

LJF: Yes, especially with the current explosion of AI as being such a prevalent, predominant form of our lives. A lot of people are increasingly, in the humanities, looking at the ways in which this is now a necessary part of the field that we need to wrestle with and engage with.

A lot of my work is on how does the public understand AI? And that has a lot more to do with understanding social discourse, understanding pop culture, fiction, than it necessarily has to do with understanding science and engineering.

FM: Are you a pessimist or optimist on AI?

LJF: I think definitely a pessimist at this point. Unfortunately, it’s getting increasingly clear that a lot of contemporary AI technology development isn’t necessarily leading to the sort of freedom from labor that is universally applicable to everyone.

It’s very reliant on exploitation, both in terms of the data that goes into building a lot of these new AI models, as well as in who’s actually doing the work of training these models.

Contemporary AI, a lot of it — at least for me personally — I have not found all that useful in my everyday life. It’s not something I turn do very often outside of my own kind of research.

FM: What scares you the most about AI?

LJF: Right now there’s a lot of issues, particularly around the ways it’s being integrated into our everyday lives without necessarily having the proper safeguards in terms of things like bias and discrimination.

I think increasingly, the fear for me would be how much this new turn towards AI is really pushing us further towards climate disaster and ecological disaster. The energy costs, the water costs for a lot of the current AI boom are pretty astronomical.

Considering how pressing climate change is, that is probably the thing that I would fear the most in terms of AI.

FM: How does pop culture shape AI and vice versa?

LJF: Pop culture, particularly on the level of public reception, is probably one of the most important things in terms of how the public receives AI. You can see this increasingly in the ways that a lot of tech moguls or people in these AI fields will routinely refer to things like Skynet from “The Terminator” series or the androids in “Blade Runner.”

A lot of the times, the references — in terms of warning of the potential apocalyptic futures of AI or the existential crisis that AI might prompt — are reliant on being sold in relationship to pop culture.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so easy to actually be convinced that AI is conscious, or is able to have these intelligent conversations with you. We are predisposed to expect that as our future. We’re brought up in a milieu where all of our stories about that feature AI or have robots, particularly conscious robots. They act like humans.

But it also, in subtle ways, determines how researchers approach these things. A good example of this is Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” It’s something that’s pretty regularly invoked and used as an example in actual computing spaces.

So much of science fiction is crucially the working out of the social repercussions of the science. And so the science offers this raw material of what might happen. And then the fiction, the pop culture, is really working out what is the social repercussions of that.

FM: How have we moved beyond [Edward] Said, and how do you see Asian American popular culture and representation evolving in the future?

LJF: Traditional Orientalism is a lot about Asian primativity and savagery, or not being as developed as the West or other parts of the world. And techno-orientalism is almost the flip side of that.

It is projecting Asia into a mythical future rather than a mythical past. But nevertheless, there’s a lot of continuum on the ways in which Asia is never allowed to be in the present.

FM: You have been a strong proponent of creating an Ethnic Studies concentration. Why is an Ethnic Studies concentration needed, as opposed to current EMR?

LJF: The concentration proposal we have is going to be continuing the focus not just on ethnic studies, but also border migration studies and our approach to global indigeneity — which I think is how the field of Ethnic Studies has developed. It’s consistently moved towards this transnational framework.

It has been a long-standing request from the students, something around over 40 years since the first proposal for an Ethnic Studies concentration was given at Harvard.

So Harvard is a little bit unusual, actually, in not having a full-fledged concentration focused on Ethnic Studies. So I’m hopeful that we’re close to finally getting that done.

FM: You also study critical race theory, and in light of the events at Harvard in the past year and also recent policies under the Trump administration, where are initiatives like DEI and critical race theory going to be headed?

LJF: I’m not sure how things are going to move in terms of the larger frameworks — especially on a political front. But for us, for me in my classroom, I think these are always going to be things that are extremely important, that are going to be relevant to the things that we study, and particularly necessary in this moment.

FM: What was it like working at the Singaporean Air Force?

LJF: As a Singaporean, I had to do a mandatory two-year stint in the Air Force or in the Army in general, and I was posted to the Air Force to do media coverage. And so I was a writer and photographer for the Singapore Air Force.

It was, on a practical level, very useful for my skills, both especially as a writer and editor, which is a lot of the work that I did. And I made a lot of great friends.

FM: Did growing up in a multicultural country make you become interested in EMR?

LJF: One of the things that often distinguishes America from other spaces is its multiculturalism.

And I happen to come from a country where that’s also a major part — it’s an inherently multicultural space. I’ve always been able to compare the experiences, the differences between these two multicultural spaces. And also for me, I was Indian and in Singapore, that’s one of the minority groups. And so I’ve always been a sort of minority, both in my homeland in Singapore and in my adopted homeland, here and now in America.

—Associate Magazine Editor Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.