[Woman] could not go backward. She must, like man, marry machinery." -- Henry Adams (Christie,172)
Marge Piercy's He, She and It weaves together multiple stories and serves as a convergence for a number of major motifs pertaining to women, technology, and artificial intelligence. The story of Shira, a 21st-century mother in her late 20s who simultaneously copes with personal, familial, communal, and worldwide turmoil, is interwoven with her grandmother's retelling of a Jewish tale, "The Golem of Prague." Using the tale of the Golem as well as her Shira's frame narrative, Piercy attempts to bridge the past and present as well as mother and daughter, woman and lover, and human and cyborg. The emotional and philosophical themes are similarly woven; while the emotional center of the novel is the complexities of women's relationships, the philosophical focus of the story is the development of an artificially intelligent being, a cyborg named Yod, and the confusion of boundaries that the cyborg causes (Christie, 185). A close look at Yod's creation and growth, as well as his relationship to Shira, reveals a distinct convergence of the human and the human's creation, pointing to some of the most important tenets of artificial intelligence research and development.
At the onset of the story, at the mercy of the corporation for which she lives, the protagonist, Shira, loses custody of her son Ari to her ex-husband. Unable to appeal the decision to the giant Japanese-North American corporation that is both government and employer, Shira returns to her hometown of Tikva, one of the few democratic free towns left, to live with her grandmother, Malka, the woman who raised her. Here, Shira is hired by the father her childhood friend (and teenage lover). Avram assigns Shira, who is a specialist in computer-human user interface design, the task of improving the human interface of Yod, Avram's most recent cyborg, which Avram has broken the law to create.
It is the character of Yod that most clearly reveals issues of boundaries in artificially intelligent agents. A complex cyborg, Yod is a "cybernetic organism, fusion of computer programming and biology, real live quasi-human, with intelligence...and maybe...with free will" (Waskow, 72). In many ways, Yod's programming and being reflect a human's; he was created by one male and one female programmer, he appears human, complete with facial expressions that reflect his internal processing and resulting conclusions, and can, and does increasingly in the story, make his own decisions. Yod's abilities are developed well beyond the point of passing the Turing test, even to the point "where there is no real difference of autonomy or determination between cyborg and human" (Christie, 187).
When the reader attempts to distinguish Yod from humans, she stumbles onto complex definitions. Yod requires neither sleep nor food, and he can withstand pain well beyond the normal human thresholds. But he does have physical responses and, because he is programmed to please but still operates within his own choices, chooses to please others. In fact, Shira herself conjures up an important metaphor, referring to human impulses and values as "programming" repeatedly in the course of their relationship, which develops into a love affair.
But Yod poses dilemmas for his human interface trainer, Shira, and, later, when his identity is revealed, for the whole community of Tikva. Here Piercy introduces us to a new set of values, but she does so subtly. As Yod's identity is revealed, the community must make decisions about his welfare and rights. Should an artificially intelligent creation, though devised to serve humans, be given the same rights and responsibilities as human Tikva citizens? Can he vote in the town meetings? (Waskow, 72). Must he be compensated monetarily according to the same salary structures by which human Tikva residents are paid? More importantly, however, the question of Yod's very personal identity arises: "Who or what is a creature that is programmed with both a woman's and a man's mentality?" (Waskow, 72). It is a question we will need to wrestle with as we trip into further development of artificial intelligence.
Piercy does not, however, position us for the future without a solid rooting in the past. Just as we see Shira's life with Yod unfold in the novel, we also follow the tale of "The Golem of Prague" as Malka, in the first person, narrates her interpretation of the tale to Yod. In 1600, the great Rabbi Judah Loew gave "life and mission to protect the Jewish people from pogroms" to a peculiar creature derived from earthen clay named Joseph (Waskow, 73). Kind and strong, Joseph is also prone to misusing his strength and killing those who attack the Jewish community. In "Androgyny and Beyond," Arthur Waskow writes that by "confronting our thoughts and feelings about the quasi-human Golem, we face, in a profound way, the question of what it means to be human" (73). Are we at the mercy of billions of years of programming from "chemical and biological evolution?" or are we "free and sacred?" (Waskow, 73) By interweaving two stories of artificial life forms, Piercy confronts us with a new distinction between human and person.
Yod's tragic end -- like the Golem's -- demonstrates Piercy's possible direction: the world is not yet ready for a creature designed to protect us and, ultimately, be a weapon against our enemies.
Piercy does provide us with other possible pointers to the future. In the character of Nili, an associate of Shira's mother, a data pirate, we have an example of a human-machine hybrid. Nili is introduced as an "extremely augmented" human with "considerably internal circuitry for combat and communication" as well as advanced scanning capacities (195). Although human, Nili has chemical and mechanical enhancements that enable her to maneuver more effectively; she can jump, kick, run, etc. far better than any non-enhanced human being. Nili is from the Middle East, the target of bio-chemical-nuclear war, a region where no life is supposedly possible. Referred to as the Black Zone, Jerusalem and its surrounding areas do not even have access to the Net, a worldwide communication system that even is linked to the anarchic, neglected "Glop" region. From Nili, however, we learn that the Black Zone has supported the birth of what we may consider a new breed of human, one that has been mechanically and chemically equipped for better sensory and physical capacity.
He, She and It provides a story about women, science, technology, politics, and the future, all "set in particular relations one to another" (Christie, 171). Exemplifying significant motifs in the development of artificially intelligent beings, the novel would be more appropriate for fans of science fiction and feminist novels more so than scholars of artificial intelligence, due largely to the focus on the complexities of Yod and Shira's romance. Most importantly, the novel prompts us to think about the rights and responsibilities of beings who are persons but not humans.