Cave and Dihal put together this collection against a lopsided picture. Across the anglophone West and well outside it, ordinary understanding of artificial intelligence arrives by way of Hollywood, while the people actually building the technology are drawn disproportionately from one narrow group: American, white and male.

The volume sets that picture beside the many other places where thinking machines have been imagined. Long before anyone could construct one, they were already appearing in religious and philosophical thought, in fiction and on film, in traditions scattered across the world. Contributors from scholarship and from the arts follow what happens where those local stories meet digital technology and the dominant Western versions of it, and how fresh imaginaries emerge from the collision, varying sharply from one setting to another.

Some of the resulting chapters speak directly to debates in AI ethics: how Chinese and American conceptions of the technology diverge, and what neo-colonialism looks like in digital form.