Recent progress has been made towards developing automated companions for the elderly. Building on work in the early days of artificial intelligence that showed that computers could deliver non-directive counselling, the possibility arises that computers could be used to provide people with an opportunity for spiritual conversation. Research using Wizard-of-Oz methodology shows that at least some people find it helpful to have spiritual conversations with what they believe to be an avatar, and work using GPT-3 shows that computers can be an acceptable interlocutor in spiritual conversation. The possibility now arises of developing a spiritual companion that would be personalised for a particular individual and become familiar with their spiritual life. This would not, in every way, replace a human spiritual guide, but could provide a resource that at least some people would find valuable and would assist in their spiritual development.

This chapter argues that Wagner’s Schopenhauerian understanding of music reveals important aspects of video game music, particularly its erotic dimensions. Armed with, on the one hand, a Wagnerian-Schopenhauerian understanding of music, erotics, and metaphysics, and on the other Kulezic-Wilson’s erotics of cinematic listening, the chapter proposes a Wagnerian erotics of game music on three counts. First, music is an element of the video game medium that dissolves hard boundaries of a single ‘self’ of the player’s identity and takes players ‘out of themselves’. Secondly, games give musical voice to the will, and chart our interaction with it. Finally, games often use musical structures that arrest any broader sense of development, creating a temporal suspension and denial of the will that Wagner sought to reflect in his musical fabric. This chapter concludes with a brief case study that identifies these three elements – identity, the will, and temporality – in The Dig (1995).

This chapter draws on a series of contemporary Irish novels, charting the way everyday ‘technological objects’ – phones, laptops, computers – do more than simply sit alongside fictional characters. When we see ‘Connell’s face illuminated by the lit display’ of a phone in Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018), we see a moment of intimacy between the characters. When Sinéad Hynes is shown ‘Googling [in bed]’ in Elaine Feeney’s As You Were (2020), we learn much about the character’s desire for privacy, her realism, her sense of humour. As the boy in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013) hammers the controls of a computer game, or Anne Enright’s Gina in The Forgotten Waltz manages her extramarital affair on her smartphone, we see them finding refuge, expression, and intimacy in the company of their endlessly understanding machines. These are the machines that support their users, distract them, comfort them. The console consoles.

In an epilogue that examines the current shift from human to animatronic performers in film and video, this book concludes with a meditation on the contemporary ambition to “go viral.” The history of computer-generated imaging (CGI) technology suggests that, in its pixelated form, a new - if also contested - concept of self has emerged for the twenty-first century. While fantasies of disembodiment and photo-realistic avatars of domination and destruction persist in contemporary media, pixilation offers us an alternative model of self that presages a post-Anthropogenic era. By fracturing the contours of a reified identity, the pixelated image invites us to re-envision ourselves as multi-celled organisms capable of co-existing with other such life forms within a shared biosphere. Inscribed in this new performance form, in other words, is yet more evidence for the ways we seek to comprehend and adapt to changes in our ever-modernizing world.

Is identity formation a “discovery” or a “creation”? In contemporary Western views, the latter seems to win this classic debate. After outlining how identity may be viewed as both a creative process and product, this chapter addresses several levels across which creativity and identity development are intertwined. To illustrate the dynamic relationship between both constructs, an underlying thread of this chapter focuses on the opportunities digital worlds give us to explore and express our identity, and, reciprocally, how our experiences in digital worlds – in particular the embodiment of “alternative” selves through immersive virtual reality – can transform our view of ourselves and the world around us. These new ways to “create our identity” bring about new fundamental questions concerning the way future generations will navigate their developmental tasks. Directions to embrace these digital realities for the betterment of human development are discussed.

Sophie Hackford explores the idea that the way that computers see the world is becoming our dominant reality. The idea that a physical object, and its data ‘exhaust’, are in constant dialogue with each other. As machine autonomy creeps into our everyday lives, we are creating a physical internet, where people, objects, vehicles move as seamlessly in the real world as data moves around the internet. Digital bots or ‘agents’ might represent us in interactions with our banks, friends, colleagues. Autonomous companies might soon be big players in the economy. Hackford will explore a world where human and machine ‘vision’ will collaborate, compete and even merge together.

In Chapter 8: Resources, you will select resources for your learning activity. Resources are sources of information that support learning. You will apply adult learning principles to the resources you select.

Marco Polo, Petrarch, Tasso, Croce interested Borges, however Dante sat at the very highest pinnacle in his map of world literature and permeates his works. Italy took to Borges with intense enthusiasm, starting in the mid-1950s, earlier than in most countries. Following his death, a pivotal point came in 1998 when the rights to his entire oeuvre were acquired by the publishind house, Adelphi. Many highly important writers absorbed Borgesian elements, with Calvino, Sciascia, and Eco standing out. The case of Eco as a Borges avatar is compelling. Sciascia drew out hidden political and historical aspects in Borges’s work. Borges exercise influence on Italian fantastic literature both before and after his death. And the adaptation of ’Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ by Bertolucci in ’The Spider’s Stratagem’ is an example of the astonishing energy Borges gave to two generations and more of Italian literature and culture.