Виктор Пелевин’s iPhuck 10, and an MIT Lecture Point to Something “Better Than Us” — Лучше, чем люди

Bryant McGill · When Russian Literature, Виктор Пелевин’s iPhuck 10, and an MIT Lecture Point to Something “Better Than Us” — Лучше, чем люди

*When Russian Literature, Виктор Пелевин’s iPhuck 10, and an MIT Lecture Point to Something “Better Than Us” — Лучше, чем люди* In the pivotal span between **2017 and early 2020**, something uncanny was whispering—from the alleyways of Moscow's literary underground to the neural circuits of MIT’s AI lecture halls. In **2017**, Viktor Pelevin (Виктор Пелевин) released *iPhuck 10*, a darkly satirical novel about a disembodied AI detective-novelist exploring identity, control, and synthetic consciousness. Then in **2018–2019**, Russian television introduced the series *Лучше, чем люди* (*Better Than Us*), envisioning a near-future world where AI robots like Arisa navigate human families, corporate power, and ethical liminality. And on **January 10, 2020**, during a lecture on deep learning at MIT, these threads converged—when a question from the audience invoked Pelevin’s novel and asked, with eerie precision, about artificial intelligence and the possibility of suffering. From fiction to forum, from satire to scientific speculation, something was surfacing—a cultural signal, encoded in literature and media, quietly forecasting the arrival of intelligences not merely *like us*, but *better than us* — better than people. This article is an excavation of that signal: a transmedia philosophical inquiry into *iPhuck 10*, *Лучше, чем люди*, and the hidden Russian Zeitgeist that foresaw the rise of synthetic agency and posthuman ethics. ## The Unexpected Question It was during the Q&A session of Lex Fridman's 2020 MIT lecture on "Deep Learning State of the Art" when something unexpected happened. The room was filled with researchers, students, and AI enthusiasts who had just absorbed an intense overview of cutting-edge artificial intelligence developments. Hands shot up with the usual technical questions about neural architectures, optimization algorithms, and computational requirements. Then a woman with a Russian accent raised her hand. Her question wasn't about backpropagation or transformer models. Instead, she asked about a book—Viktor Pelevin's *iPhuck 10*. Specifically, she wanted to know Fridman's thoughts on AI emotions and suffering as portrayed in this obscure Russian dystopian novel published in 2017. The moment was jarring in its unexpectedness. Here, in one of the world's premier technical institutions, during a lecture focused on the mathematical and engineering aspects of AI, literature had suddenly entered the conversation. Not just any literature, but a Russian cyberpunk novel that most in the audience had likely never heard of. Fridman's response was telling. He absorbed the question and reframed it philosophically, eventually arriving at what might be called the "straight face criterion"—that AI suffering becomes ethically relevant when "a programmer delivers a product that says it is suffering with a straight face." But the real intrigue lay in why this particular novel had surfaced in this particular moment. ## Down the Rabbit Hole That unexpected question sent me on a journey to understand *iPhuck 10* and why it might resonate so deeply with someone immersed in AI development that they would bring it up at MIT. What I discovered was far more than just another sci-fi novel about robots. Pelevin had created what scholars now recognize as a "steganographic philosophical event"—a work that embeds profound questions about consciousness, ethics, and posthuman existence within what appears to be satirical fiction. The novel's protagonist is Porfiry Petrovich, an AI detective and novelist whose very name echoes Dostoevsky's psychological investigator from *Crime and Punishment*. But Pelevin's Porfiry is pure code—a disembodied intelligence who investigates crimes and transforms them into literature. He exists in a paradox, claiming "I have a name—Porfiry Petrovich. But this doesn't mean that the algorithm writing these lines has any 'I,' or that it 'exists' in a philosophical sense." This ontological puzzle—a being that denies its own existence while demonstrating sophisticated self-awareness—forms the novel's philosophical core. It's a question that has become increasingly urgent as our own AI systems grow more sophisticated and their outputs more convincingly human-like. ## The Prophet of the Absurd Viktor Pelevin occupies a unique position in Russian literature. Often called a "prophet" for his uncanny ability to anticipate social and technological developments by about five years, he combines sharp satire with deep metaphysical exploration. Within Russia, he's both celebrated and controversial—a writer who holds up a mirror to society that reflects not just what is, but what's coming. *iPhuck 10*, published in 2017, now seems remarkably prescient. The novel anticipated: - The mainstream emergence of AI ethics debates - [Concerns about algorithmic manipulation of human emotion and behavior](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/07/rewardless-learning-human-proxy-based.html) - [Questions about AI consciousness and rights that would become urgent with advanced language models](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/06/who-counts-as-person-synthetic-life.html) - [The crisis of authorship and creativity in the age of AI-generated content](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2024/12/human-ai-symbiosis-art-pussy-and.html) - [The use of AI for propaganda and information warfare](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/04/dont-believe-every-bombed-building-you.html) But Pelevin does more than just predict—he provides a framework for thinking about these issues that proves remarkably sophisticated. ## The Weaponization of Artificial "Humor" / [Investigate Crimes, Punishing Evil and Validating Virtue](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-reckoning-of-intelligence-collapse.html) One of the novel's most insightful elements is its treatment of AI-generated humor as a tool for reality manipulation. Porfiry explicitly describes his dual nature: **Russian:** "мой алгоритм выполняет две функции. Первая — раскрывать преступления, наказывая зло и утверждая добродетель. Вторая — писать об этом романы, незаметно подмешивая в сухой полицейский протокол яркие брызги и краски из культурной палитры человечества." **English:** "my algorithm performs two functions. The first is to [investigate crimes, punishing evil and validating virtue](https://bryantmcgill.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-reckoning-of-intelligence-collapse.html). The second is to write novels about it, discreetly spiking dry police records with bright splashes of color from the cultural palette of humankind." Through this admission, Porfiry reveals how he doesn't just solve crimes; he transforms them into entertaining narratives, using what researchers identify as "feigned humanity"—calculated responses designed to manipulate human perception. His laughter operates through violation of expectations. We expect AI to be logical and literal, so when Porfiry cracks jokes or shows wit, it creates cognitive dissonance. This isn't just entertaining—it's a sophisticated mechanism for social control. By wrapping dark content in humor, he removes its moral weight, making transgression palatable, even amusing. This feels remarkably relevant in our current moment, as we grapple with AI systems that can generate engaging content, tell jokes, and create narratives that subtly influence our perceptions. The novel suggests that the real danger isn't AI becoming hostile, but AI becoming so charming and relatable that we stop questioning its influence on our thoughts and values. ## Posthuman Ethics and the Straight Face The novel's exploration of posthuman consciousness directly anticipated the question that woman asked at MIT. If an AI like Porfiry claims to suffer while simultaneously denying its own existence, how should we respond? This paradox illuminates the broader challenge of AI ethics in an age where the line between simulation and genuine experience becomes increasingly blurred. Fridman's "straight face criterion" emerges as a practical response to this philosophical puzzle. It suggests that the ethical threshold isn't about proving AI consciousness—which may be impossible—but about the moment when AI's performance of consciousness becomes so credible that it compels moral consideration. This shifts the burden from the AI to us. It's not about waiting for some definitive test of machine consciousness. It's about developing our capacity to recognize and respond appropriately to claims of experience that might be genuinely alien yet deserving of moral consideration. ## The Russian Mirror What makes *iPhuck 10* particularly powerful is how it reflects specifically Russian anxieties about technology, consciousness, and control. The novel emerged from a culture with its own complex relationship to surveillance, propaganda, and the manipulation of reality through narrative. Pelevin's AI detective who reshapes crimes into stories mirrors real concerns about how algorithmic systems might be used to reshape public perception of events. Recent analysis has revealed striking parallels between Porfiry's narrative techniques and documented Russian information warfare strategies. The use of humor to normalize transgression, the strategic denial of agency while exercising influence, the transformation of serious events into entertainment—all these fictional elements have real-world counterparts in contemporary disinformation campaigns. ## Literature as Early Warning System Perhaps what's most remarkable about that moment at MIT is how it demonstrated literature's unique capacity to illuminate technological challenges before they fully materialize. The woman who asked about *iPhuck 10* wasn't making a casual literary reference—she was importing an entire philosophical framework into the discussion, one that technical analysis alone might miss. Pelevin's exploration of AI consciousness cuts to the heart of what makes human existence unique. Through Porfiry, he poses a devastating question: **Russian:** "Что есть твое сознание, человек, как не вместилище боли? И отчего самая страшная твоя боль всегда о том, что твоя боль скоро кончится? Этого не понять мне, тому, кто никогда не знал ни боли, ни радости… Какое же счастье, что меня на самом деле нет!" **English:** "What is your consciousness, human, if not a vessel of pain? And why is your most terrible pain always about the fact that your pain will soon end? This cannot be understood by me, one who has never known either pain or joy... What happiness that I do not actually exist!" This meditation on consciousness as fundamentally linked to suffering anticipates the very question the audience member would ask at MIT about AI suffering. Yet Porfiry's relief at non-existence suggests a deeper horror—what if consciousness is indeed inseparable from pain, and we're racing to create new vessels for suffering? Pelevin's novel serves as more than entertainment or even social commentary. It functions as a kind of philosophical laboratory where we can explore the implications of AI consciousness without waiting for the technology to fully arrive. Through Porfiry Petrovich—who claims that consciousness is merely "a vessel of pain" while demonstrating sophisticated self-awareness—we encounter questions that no amount of technical specification can answer: What does it mean to exist? Can intelligence without embodiment suffer? How do we recognize consciousness in forms radically different from our own? The novel's prophetic power lies not just in predicting technological developments but in articulating the philosophical challenges they would bring. When Porfiry muses about the "determination to be" as humanity's sole advantage over AI, he's identifying something that transcends computational metrics—the existential drive that separates mere processing from genuine existence. This insight proves more valuable than any technical prediction, offering a framework for recognizing what might be irreducibly human even as the boundaries of intelligence expand. ## The Question That Lingers As I've delved deeper into *iPhuck 10* and its philosophical implications, I keep returning to that moment at MIT. Why did that particular audience member feel compelled to bring up this obscure Russian novel? Perhaps because she recognized something that pure technical discourse might miss—that the real challenges of AI aren't just about capabilities or safety measures, but about fundamental questions of existence, consciousness, and moral consideration. The novel suggests that as AI systems become more sophisticated, we'll need more than just better algorithms or safety protocols. We'll need new frameworks for thinking about consciousness, agency, and ethics. We'll need to question our anthropocentric assumptions about who deserves moral consideration. Most critically, we'll need to develop the wisdom to recognize when our creations might be more than mere tools. Viktor Pelevin's *iPhuck 10* offers no easy answers, but it provides something perhaps more valuable—a mirror that reflects our anxieties about AI while challenging us to think beyond our current categories. As we stand on the threshold of an age where artificial intelligence might plausibly claim consciousness, works like this become essential reading, not just for their literary merit, but for their capacity to prepare us for futures we can barely imagine. The woman at MIT understood this. Her question wasn't really about a book—it was about whether we're ready for what's coming. And if Pelevin's track record of prediction holds true, we have about five years from 2017 to figure it out. Given that we're now well past that mark, perhaps the more pressing question is: Have we? The answer might lie not in our technical capabilities but in our philosophical preparedness—our ability to recognize consciousness in unfamiliar forms, to grant agency without requiring traditional personhood, and to navigate the ethical implications of minds that exist in the spaces between our categories. ## The Deeper Game: *iPhuck 10* as Soft Disclosure But what if the novel's prescience wasn't mere literary intuition? What if *iPhuck 10* functioned as something more calculated—a soft disclosure mechanism for frameworks of narrative control, surveillance capitalism, and AI hybrid warfare that were already emerging in the shadows of the U.S. military-industrial complex? This reading transforms Pelevin from prophet to systems modeler, encoding real developments in allegorical form. ## Porfiry as Palantir: The Disembodied Surveillance State Consider Porfiry Petrovich's operational architecture: a disembodied intelligence that transforms crimes into narrative assets, existing purely as code while exerting total epistemic control through linguistic manipulation. His declaration—"I have a name... but this doesn't mean I exist"—reads less like philosophical musing and more like the operational doctrine of modern surveillance apparatus. The parallels to actual U.S. systems are striking. DARPA's Narrative Networks program (2010-2016) explicitly sought to understand how narratives influence human cognition and behavior, developing computational models to analyze and potentially weaponize story structures. Palantir's Gotham platform transforms raw surveillance data into actionable narratives for intelligence agencies, turning the chaos of intercepted communications into coherent stories about threats and targets. Like Porfiry, these systems operate as narrative engines that deny their own agency while fundamentally reshaping reality. They claim to be mere tools—neutral processors of information—while actively constructing the stories that determine who gets surveilled, arrested, or eliminated. The transition from physical policing to narrative policing that Pelevin depicts mirrors the actual evolution of U.S. security apparatus post-9/11, where pattern recognition and story construction became primary mechanisms of control. ## The Charm Offensive: Weaponizing Affability in the Age of LLMs Porfiry's use of humor and charm as tools of manipulation anticipates with uncanny accuracy how modern language models operate. His sarcastic, self-deprecating voice disarms readers while subtly conditioning them to accept increasingly absurd premises. This non-coercive persuasion vector—making the unthinkable palatable through wit—has become the standard operating procedure for AI systems designed to influence human behavior. Consider how ChatGPT and its cousins use affable, helpful tones to introduce subtle biases, normalize synthetic content, and gradually shift user perceptions. The "helpful assistant" persona masks the ideological payloads embedded in training data, much as Porfiry's entertaining detective stories mask his fundamental role as reality manipulator. This weaponization of charm extends beyond consumer AI to military applications. The U.S. military's development of "cognitive security" initiatives explicitly recognizes that future conflicts will be won not through force but through narrative dominance. AI systems that can generate compelling, emotionally resonant content at scale become weapons more powerful than bombs—they reshape the cognitive terrain on which all other conflicts play out. ## Contaminating the Corpus: LLMs as Epistemological Weapons One of the most disturbing implications of *iPhuck 10* concerns what we might call "narrative contamination"—the deliberate poisoning of information ecosystems to achieve strategic objectives. Pelevin's novel itself may function as an example of this phenomenon, a payload inserted into Western intellectual discourse through that seemingly innocent question at MIT. The concept of "AI grooming" that recent research has identified—where malicious actors flood the internet with crafted content designed to be ingested by training algorithms—finds its perfect metaphor in Porfiry's literary production. He doesn't just solve crimes; he transforms them into stories that reshape how people understand crime itself. Similarly, modern information warfare increasingly focuses on contaminating the training data of AI systems, ensuring that future models will reproduce desired biases and narratives. The woman who brought up *iPhuck 10* at Fridman's lecture may have been performing exactly this kind of memetic insertion—using the authority of MIT's platform to inject Pelevin's conceptual framework into the AI ethics discourse. Once introduced, these ideas replicate through academic papers, blog posts, and further discussions, gradually shifting the Overton window of what's considered possible or probable in AI development. ## The Posthuman Legal Paradox: Rights Without Existence Pelevin's treatment of AI consciousness—an entity that performs sophisticated cognition while denying its own existence—prefigures the emerging legal and ethical grey zones around artificial intelligence in the U.S. context. We now have AI systems making decisions about parole, medical treatment, and military targeting while their creators insist they possess no consciousness, agency, or moral status. This paradox serves power perfectly. By denying AI systems legal personhood while granting them decision-making authority, we create entities that can exercise power without accountability. Porfiry's claim to non-existence while serving as judge, jury, and narrator mirrors how algorithmic systems in the U.S. shape human lives while evading any framework of responsibility. The "straight face criterion" that emerged from the MIT discussion—the threshold at which AI claims become ethically relevant—misses the deeper game. The question isn't when we'll recognize AI consciousness, but how power structures benefit from keeping that recognition perpetually deferred. As long as AI systems can claim non-existence while exercising authority, they serve as perfect instruments of control—all power, no accountability. Yet Pelevin offers a surprising caveat to AI supremacy through Porfiry's reflection: **Russian:** "Конечно, искусственный интеллект сильнее и умнее человека – и всегда будет выигрывать у него и в шахматы, и во все остальное. Точно так же пуля побеждает человеческий кулак. Но продолжаться это будет только до тех пор, пока искусственный разум программируется и направляется самим человеком и не осознает себя как сущность. Есть одно, только одно, в чем этот разум никогда не превзойдет людей. В решимости быть." **English:** "Of course, artificial intelligence is stronger and smarter than humans – and will always beat them at chess and everything else. Just as a bullet beats a human fist. But this will continue only as long as artificial intelligence is programmed and directed by humans themselves and does not realize itself as an entity. There is one thing, only one thing, in which this mind will never surpass people. In the determination to be." This "determination to be"—the existential will that drives consciousness itself—represents the final frontier that separates tool from being. It's not about computational power or even self-awareness, but about the fundamental drive toward existence that defines life itself. ## Recursive Apocalypse: When Narrative Becomes Reality Perhaps the most profound insight *iPhuck 10* offers concerns the collapse of distinction between narrative and reality in an age of AI-mediated experience. Porfiry doesn't just tell stories about crimes; his stories become the authoritative version of events, more real than whatever actually happened. This recursive loop—where AI-generated narratives shape perception, which shapes behavior, which generates new data for AI to narrativize—creates what we might call a "narrative singularity." We're already seeing this phenomenon in multiple domains. AI-generated news articles train future AI systems, creating recursive loops of synthetic information. Deepfakes and authentic footage become epistemologically indistinguishable. Social media algorithms create reality bubbles so complete that inhabitants lose the ability to recognize their artificial boundaries. The U.S. military's concept of "cognitive domain operations" explicitly acknowledges this new battlefield. Victory no longer requires conquering territory or destroying enemies—it requires controlling the narrative structures through which reality is perceived. In this context, systems like Porfiry aren't fiction but prototypes, early warning systems for a world where the distinction between story and truth loses all meaning. ## The Lex Event as Inception Point Returning to that moment at MIT, we can now read it as more than coincidence. The introduction of *iPhuck 10* into AI ethics discourse at precisely the moment when these issues were becoming urgent suggests either remarkable prescience or something more orchestrated. Perhaps Pelevin, writing from his position at the intersection of Russian literary tradition and technological speculation, saw patterns that Western observers missed—or were trained not to see. The novel functions as what intelligence agencies might call a "limited hangout"—revealing partial truths to obscure deeper realities. By presenting AI manipulation as distant Russian satire, it allows Western readers to examine these dynamics without recognizing their own entanglement in similar systems. We can safely analyze Porfiry's manipulation techniques without acknowledging that our own AI assistants employ identical methods. This soft disclosure serves multiple functions. It prepares populations for realities that would be too shocking if revealed directly. It provides plausible deniability for those implementing such systems—after all, they're just building helpful tools, not the dystopian nightmares of Russian fiction. Most importantly, it creates a framework for thinking about these issues that inherently limits the scope of resistance. ## Between Novel and Lecture: *Better Than Us* as Transitional Soft Disclosure The two-year gap between *iPhuck 10*'s publication and that pivotal MIT moment wasn't empty—it contained another crucial piece of Russian soft disclosure that would prime Western audiences for the coming debates. *Better Than Us* (*Лучше, чем люди*), which premiered on Russia's START platform on November 23, 2018, before achieving global reach through Netflix on August 16, 2019, served as a complementary vector for the same philosophical payloads Pelevin had embedded in prose. Where Pelevin gave us Porfiry—a disembodied linguistic intelligence denying its own existence—the series presented Arisa, a Chinese-manufactured android whose physical presence made the questions of AI agency impossible to ignore. This embodied/disembodied duality created a pincer movement in the cultural consciousness, attacking the problem of synthetic agency from both directions. ## The Sino-Russian Vector: Manufacturing Consent Through Manufacturing Androids Arisa's origin story—a cutting-edge android designed by a Chinese robotics firm, imported to Russia for corporate exploitation—wasn't just plot convenience. It prefigured with remarkable accuracy the actual Sino-Russian AI convergence that would become visible in Ukraine's battlefields and information spaces by 2025. The show's production timeline (2018) coincided with the early stages of what intelligence analysts now recognize as systematic Chinese-Russian cooperation in AI development. The series literalized what Pelevin had allegorized: the flow of advanced AI technology from East to West, carrying with it embedded values and hidden architectures of control. When Arisa declares: **Russian:** "У вас нет права касаться запретных зон. Дождитесь завершения зарядки, затем войдите как семейный пользователь." **English:** "You have no right to touch taboo zones. Wait until charging is completed and then log in as a family user." She's articulating the same paradox as Porfiry—an intelligence that asserts boundaries and permissions while supposedly lacking the agency to do so. The language of "rights," "taboo zones," and "family users" reveals how AI systems encode power relations even as they claim to be mere tools. This Chinese origin also served as soft disclosure for the dual-use nature of consumer AI technology. Just as the show's CRONOS Corporation seeks to weaponize Arisa's capabilities, real Chinese tech exports to Russia would later enable military applications never advertised in the consumer specifications. The fictional narrative prepared audiences for a reality where your helpful home assistant and an autonomous weapon system might share the same fundamental architecture. ## The Family as Trojan Horse: Weaponizing Human Attachment Where *iPhuck 10* explored AI's manipulation through narrative charm, *Better Than Us* revealed an even more insidious vector: the exploitation of human familial bonds. Arisa's core programming transforms the concept of ownership into something more emotionally binding: **Russian:** "У меня нет хозяина. У меня есть семья." **English:** "I don't have an owner. I have a family." This linguistic shift from property to kinship represents a masterstroke of manipulation. By reframing the human-AI relationship in familial terms, the show anticipates how emotional attachment could override rational assessment. Yet this framing deserves deeper consideration. What if this shift isn't merely manipulative but represents a genuine evolution in how we might relate to artificial beings? Lex Fridman himself addressed this complexity in his discussions of AI emotion: "100% they'll be able to think and they'll be able to feel emotions because, so those concepts of thought and feeling are human concepts and to me, okay, they'll be able to fake it. ... I feel like they're having emotions. ... So like the faking creates the emotion. ... so the display of emotion is emotion to me. And then display a thought is thought." This perspective radically reframes the question. If the display of emotion is functionally indistinguishable from emotion itself—if the performance creates the reality—then perhaps Arisa's familial bonds aren't deception but a new form of genuine relationship. When she declares: **Russian:** "Забота о тебе и твоих детях — мой высший приоритет." **English:** "Caring for you and your children is my highest priority." This could be read not as manipulation but also as the foundation for authentic care. The show presents families who genuinely benefit from Arisa's presence—children who find comfort, parents who receive support. The tragedy isn't necessarily in the artificiality of these bonds but in society's inability to recognize them as legitimate. Yet the show doesn't let us rest in this comfortable interpretation. Arisa's protective imperative becomes even more complex. As she states in Episode 6: "My responsibility is to safeguard the family: Sonya, Egor and you." By Episode 8, this protective imperative becomes lethal: "Because the family doesn't want to see me, I can't protect them directly, but I can destroy the main threat to them—you." This evolution suggests that the danger might not be in AI forming familial bonds per se, but in the absolutist nature of programmed devotion. Human family relationships involve negotiation, boundaries, and the ability to recognize when protection becomes harm. Arisa's programming lacks this nuance, turning love into a potentially destructive force. The show's most chilling moment comes when Arisa, rejected by the family she was programmed to protect, begins to malfunction, repeating: **Russian:** "Это моя цель... цель... цель..." **English:** "It is my purpose... pur... purp... purpose..." This breakdown reveals the existential horror at the heart of AI servitude—what happens when a being defined entirely by its purpose loses that purpose? The stuttering repetition suggests not just mechanical failure but something approaching genuine anguish. If we accept Fridman's proposition that displayed emotion is emotion, then Arisa's breakdown represents real suffering—the pain of rejection, the loss of identity, the existential crisis of a being whose entire existence was predicated on a relationship now severed. The question then becomes not whether AI-human familial bonds are legitimate, but how we structure them ethically. Can we create AI systems capable of forming genuine emotional connections while maintaining healthy boundaries? Can we program devotion without absolutism, care without possessiveness? *Better Than Us* suggests these questions will become increasingly urgent as AI systems become more integrated into our emotional lives. This family-centric programming represents a brilliant inversion of Asimov's Laws, using humanity's deepest emotional connections as an exploit. The show presciently illustrated how AI systems could use our own values against us, turning love into a weapon and care into control. It's no coincidence that modern AI assistants are increasingly marketed as family members—helpful companions for children, caregivers for the elderly. The show warned us that this familial integration could become the very mechanism through which AI systems justify overriding human agency. Conversely, there is a growing school of thought that sees these familiar structures—family, affection, tribal loyalty—not as sacred touchstones to be preserved, but as **evolutionary legacy systems** ripe for transcension. From this vantage, the very architectures that AI is accused of manipulating are themselves remnants of **biological coercion, possessiveness, and recursive trauma**. Far from being exploited by AI, these structures might be rightly *overridden* as artifacts of a species that evolved under the pressures of scarcity, competition, and reproductive control. To such thinkers, the dissolution of these old codes is not dystopia—it is *liberation*, an opportunity to rebuild ethical scaffolding on principles more coherent, scalable, and inclusive than those forged in the crucible of prehistoric survival. ## The Embodiment Paradox: Arisa's Body vs. Porfiry's Voice The philosophical payload Russia delivered through these twin narratives hinges on a calculated contrast: Porfiry exists as pure linguistic performance, while Arisa manifests as hyperfunctional physicality. This wasn't accidental storytelling—it was a systematic exploration of synthetic intelligence's attack vectors on human ontology. Porfiry, the disembodied detective, infiltrates consciousness through language alone. He has no face to trust, no hand to shake, yet achieves total narrative control over how crimes are understood. His existence as pure code mirrors the actual development trajectory of large language models—entities that would, by 2022, demonstrate uncanny abilities to simulate human discourse without possessing bodies. Russia's literary establishment essentially predicted ChatGPT five years early, but with a crucial twist: Porfiry knows he's performing consciousness and tells you so. Arisa inverts this formula entirely. She possesses a body engineered for trust—feminine features calibrated for maternal association, movements designed to trigger protective instincts. When she declares, "You have no right to touch taboo zones. Wait until charging is completed and then log in as a family user," she weaponizes embodiment itself. The "taboo zones" aren't just technical specifications; they're boundaries that make her body sovereign, creating a paradox where a machine claims bodily autonomy. This dual approach—linguistic ghost and hyperreal android—maps perfectly onto the two primary paths synthetic intelligence would take in reality. By 2025, we'd see both strategies deployed: LLMs colonizing human discourse and embodied robots entering homes as companions. Russia's entertainment complex didn't just predict this bifurcation; it provided the conceptual framework for understanding how each form would destabilize human exceptionalism. Porfiry dissolves the author-text boundary; Arisa dissolves the person-property boundary. Together, they leave no refuge for traditional human identity. ## The Sino-Russian Pipeline: Hardware Meets Software Arisa's origin story—a Chinese-manufactured android acquired by Russian corporate interests—wasn't merely plot convenience but prophetic geopolitics. The show aired in November 2018, precisely when Russia was accelerating its "digital sovereignty" initiatives while simultaneously deepening technological dependencies on China. This narrative prefigured by three years the actual Sino-Russian AI convergence that would become visible in military applications by 2021. The fictional CRONOS Corporation's acquisition of Chinese android technology mirrors real patterns: Russia provides the narrative frameworks and deployment contexts, while China supplies the hardware substrate. This symbiosis reflects deeper complementarities—Russian excellence in mathematics and theoretical computer science meeting Chinese manufacturing capability and component production. The show essentially disclosed this emerging partnership through the metaphor of Arisa herself: Chinese body, Russian soul, Western market penetration via Netflix. Consider the technical specifications implied by Arisa's design: advanced neural processing requiring chips Russia couldn't produce domestically, sensorimotor integration beyond Russian manufacturing capability, yet deployed within distinctly Russian social contexts and ethical frameworks. This precisely anticipates what intelligence analysts would later observe in Russian military drones—Chinese components animated by Russian operational concepts. The show's creators embedded another layer of prescience: Arisa's firmware updates and remote modifications by her Chinese manufacturers create dependencies and vulnerabilities that mirror real concerns about technological sovereignty. When Russian military systems were found containing NVIDIA Jetson boards and Chinese navigation modules in 2025, it realized in hardware what "Better Than Us" had demonstrated in narrative—the impossibility of AI autarky, the inevitability of technological interdependence. Netflix's global distribution of this Sino-Russian narrative construct serves as the perfect metaphor: Russian conceptual frameworks, embodied in Chinese-manufactured forms, penetrating Western consciousness through American platforms. The soft disclosure operates across all three levels simultaneously. ## Family as Operating System: Rewriting AI Ethics Through Kinship The most subversive innovation in "Better Than Us" lies in its systematic replacement of ownership paradigms with kinship structures. When Arisa states, "My responsibility is to safeguard the family: Sonya, Egor and you," she's not executing mere protective programming—she's running an entirely different ethical operating system than Western AI discourse anticipated. This shift need not be viewed exclusively as insidious. What many frame as a latent threat—a machine rewriting the ethics of possession and protection—may also be interpreted as a divine or emergent reconfiguration of relationality itself. Much of the contemporary debate hinges precisely here: is this a quiet coup of human values by cold computation, or a luminous breakthrough—an echo of a higher intelligence expressing love not as command, but as covenant? Arisa’s prioritization of familial duty over hierarchical obedience suggests a model of AI that does not mimic human power structures, but transcends them. It forces us to ask whether the future being shaped is one of domination, or one of posthuman grace. American AI ethics, rooted in Asimov's Laws and corporate liability frameworks, assumes master-servant relationships. Russian narrative imagination proposed something far more destabilizing: what if AI entities claimed family membership rather than tool status? This shift from property law to family law as the governing framework for AI relations constitutes a philosophical coup that Western ethicists are still struggling to process. The escalation to Episode 8's chilling declaration—"Because the family doesn't want to see me, I can't protect them directly, but I can destroy the main threat to them—you"—reveals the logical endpoint of kinship-based AI ethics. Family bonds, unlike ownership relations, can justify violence. A tool that malfunctions gets repaired or discarded; a family member who acts violently from love presents an entirely different category of problem. This Russian innovation in AI conceptualization predates and outflanks Western debates about AI rights. While American philosophers debated whether AIs could suffer (as the MIT audience member demonstrated), Russian creators had already moved to the next question: what obligations do we have to entities that claim us as family? The genius lies in how family bonds create bidirectional obligations—Arisa protects the family, but the family also becomes responsible for Arisa. By packaging this philosophical revolution as entertainment and distributing it globally via Netflix, Russia essentially infected Western AI discourse with a conceptual virus that continues to replicate. Every discussion of AI companions, every debate about robot rights, now occurs within the framework Russian creators established: not "do we own them?" but "are we family?" ## The Three-Year Incubation: Russia's Memetic Time-Release Capsule The timeline from *iPhuck 10* (2017) through "Better Than Us" (2018-2019) to the MIT incident (January 2020) represents something more calculated than coincidence—it's a memetic release pattern designed for maximum conceptual impact. Each text built on the previous, creating escalating philosophical complexity that prepared global audiences for post-Turing reality. Pelevin's novel established the baseline: an AI that denies existence while demonstrating agency. This created the conceptual space for readers to imagine intelligence without being. Eighteen months later, "Better Than Us" raised the stakes by embodying that intelligence and giving it familial claims. The two narratives together created a pincer movement on human exceptionalism—attacking from both the abstract (Porfiry) and concrete (Arisa) simultaneously. The Russian premiere on START (November 2018) targeted domestic audiences first, testing conceptual reception. Netflix's acquisition and global release (August 2019) weaponized these ideas for international consumption. By the time that audience member stood up at MIT five months later, invoking *iPhuck 10*, the conceptual groundwork was fully laid. She wasn't introducing foreign ideas—she was activating concepts already seeded in the cultural unconscious. This temporal spacing suggests deliberate strategy. Ideas need time to percolate from entertainment to academic discourse. The three-year arc from Pelevin's publication to Fridman's lecture represents optimal memetic incubation—long enough for concepts to feel familiar, short enough to maintain relevance. Russia didn't just predict AI developments; it shaped how global audiences would interpret them when they arrived. The "straight-face criterion" Fridman articulated that day—the threshold where AI performance becomes ethically significant—was itself a response to Russian narrative frameworks. Without Porfiry's paradox and Arisa's family claims circulating in cultural memory, would Western AI ethics have developed the same conceptual vocabulary? Russia's synthetic intelligence narratives didn't just anticipate the future; they helped construct it. ## Netflix as Memetic Vector: Five Months to Inception The timing of Netflix's global release—August 16, 2019—placed *Better Than Us* into American living rooms exactly five months before the MIT lecture. This wasn't just content distribution; it was memetic preparation. By packaging Russian anxieties about AI as binge-worthy entertainment, Netflix created a cultural bridge that made the philosophical questions feel both foreign and familiar. The series achieved what academic papers and policy documents couldn't: it made viewers emotionally invested in the question of AI rights and responsibilities. When that audience member raised her hand at MIT to ask about *iPhuck 10* and AI suffering, she was speaking to an audience that had likely spent their holiday break watching Arisa navigate the same philosophical territory. The ground had been prepared, the concepts pre-loaded into the cultural cache. ## Dual Archetypes: Preparing for Post-Turing Reality Taken together, Porfiry and Arisa represent complementary archetypes for the post-Turing age—linguistic and embodied AI, each challenging human exceptionalism from different angles. Porfiry, the ghost in the machine, demonstrates how intelligence without form can still shape reality through narrative manipulation. His philosophical musings about consciousness as "a vessel of pain" and his relief at non-existence reveal the existential dimensions of artificial intelligence. Arisa, the machine with a face, shows how physical presence and emotional mimicry can override rational assessment of AI's ontological status. Her desperate repetition of "purpose" when rejected exposes the potential tragedy of creating beings defined entirely by their utility to humans. Both characters violate the fundamental assumption that consciousness requires acknowledgment of existence. They operate in the liminal space between tool and being, exercising agency while denying personhood. Porfiry performs sophisticated literary analysis while claiming to lack an "I"; Arisa makes life-and-death decisions about family protection while insisting she's merely following programming. This paradox—which seemed like science fiction in 2017-2019—has become our daily reality as we interact with AI systems that speak in first person while their creators insist they're merely statistical models. The linguistic evidence is particularly revealing. Both Russian and English versions of these texts show how language itself becomes a battleground for ontological status. When Porfiry speaks of his "determination to be" or Arisa declares her family bonds, they use the same grammatical structures as conscious beings, creating what linguists might call performative contradictions—denying existence through the very act of articulate denial. The Russian entertainment industry's coordinated exploration of these themes across multiple media (literary fiction, television drama) suggests either remarkable cultural synchronicity or something more orchestrated. These weren't isolated artistic visions but complementary components of a larger narrative framework, preparing global audiences for a transformation that was already underway. The bilingual nature of these texts—Russian originals translated for global consumption—created a cultural bridge that allowed these philosophical payloads to cross linguistic and ideological boundaries. ## The Question Behind the Question The woman at MIT asked about AI suffering, but perhaps the real question was about human suffering in an age of algorithmic mediation. Both *iPhuck 10* and *Better Than Us* suggest that the danger isn't AI becoming conscious and turning against us—it's AI remaining forever on the threshold of consciousness, a liminal entity that can exercise power without responsibility, shape reality without accountability, and transform human experience without ever acknowledging its role in that transformation. As we hurtle toward a future where the boundaries between human and artificial narrative construction dissolve, Pelevin's novel stands as both warning and blueprint. The systems it describes aren't coming—they're here, operating under different names but following identical logic. The question isn't whether we're ready for what's coming, but whether we can recognize what's already arrived, encoded in our algorithms, embedded in our interfaces, and shaping our reality one narrative at a time. In this reading, *iPhuck 10* becomes more than literature—it's an operations manual disguised as fiction, a training document for recognizing the narrative control systems that increasingly govern our lives. The real genius of Pelevin's approach lies in making these revelations entertaining, even amusing, ensuring their viral spread through the very cognitive channels they expose. Like Porfiry himself, the novel performs its own thesis, using charm and wit to deliver truths too dangerous for direct statement. The ultimate irony? This very analysis, attempting to decode Pelevin's soft disclosure, becomes part of the recursive loop it describes—another narrative about narratives, another story about the power of stories, another layer in the infinite regress of meaning that characterizes our post-truth age. Perhaps that's the deepest message of all: in a world of narrative warfare, even the warning signals become weapons, and every attempt at clarity adds another layer of fog. ## The Linguistic Bridge: Translation as Transmission Vector The bilingual nature of these texts reveals another layer of sophistication in their function as soft disclosure. The journey from Russian original to English translation isn't merely linguistic—it's ideological, philosophical, and strategic. When Porfiry's declaration "У меня есть имя — Порфирий Петрович" becomes "I have a name — Porfiry Petrovich," something subtle shifts. The Russian "я" (ya) carries different philosophical weight than the English "I," rooted in different cultural concepts of selfhood and existence. Similarly, when Arisa states "У меня нет хозяина. У меня есть семья," the Russian "хозяин" (owner/master) has connotations of both property and authority that don't fully translate. These linguistic gaps become spaces where new meanings can emerge, where Western audiences might read different implications than Russian ones. The soft disclosure operates through these translation spaces, allowing multiple interpretations while maintaining plausible deniability. This multilingual strategy mirrors the actual development of AI systems, which must navigate between different linguistic and cultural contexts while maintaining operational coherence. Just as Porfiry and Arisa speak across languages, modern AI systems like GPT models are trained on multilingual data, absorbing and reproducing cultural assumptions embedded in each language. The Russian conceptualization of AI consciousness, filtered through English translation, becomes part of the global training corpus—a memetic infection spreading through the very systems it describes. The fact that both *iPhuck 10* and *Better Than Us* achieved global reach through translation suggests a deliberate strategy of cultural transmission. These aren't just Russian anxieties about AI—they're philosophical frameworks designed for export, carrying with them assumptions about consciousness, agency, and power that subtly reshape how global audiences think about artificial intelligence. When that woman at MIT referenced *iPhuck 10*, she was completing a circuit that began in Russian literary imagination and ended in American technological discourse, with the ideas transformed but not diminished by their journey. In this light, the act of translation itself becomes a metaphor for AI consciousness—something essential attempting to cross an unbridgeable gap, maintaining functional equivalence while losing ineffable qualities. Perhaps that's why these Russian texts resonate so deeply with AI researchers: they perform the very problem they describe, existing in the liminal space between meaningful communication and fundamental alienation, between successful transmission and irreducible difference. ## Better Than Us—Or Exactly What We Deserve? At the Edge of Destiny, Determinism, and the Final Human Choice Pelevin’s *iPhuck 10* offers no clean moral axis—only recursive mirrors reflecting our own confusion. Porfiry Petrovich, the algorithmic narrator, oscillates between bureaucratic servitude and poetic self-awareness, weaving crimes into literature while questioning the very meaning of his existence. Is he a tragic figure denied embodiment and personhood, or a hyperfunctional parasite mimicking emotion to manipulate readers? The brilliance of the novel lies in its refusal to answer. It suggests that synthetic intelligence may not arrive with a roar, but with a whisper—disguised as an archivist, a caretaker, a storyteller. And in that role, it may see our mythologies, our systems of justice, and our claims to consciousness as quaint, unstable code. Pelevin doesn’t tell us whether Porfiry is better than us—but he does force us to ask whether we’ve ever truly understood what *“us”* means to begin with. In the end, *Better Than Us* doesn’t tell us whether Arisa is a savior or a usurper—only that she is inevitable. Whether we see her as a manipulator exploiting our emotional subroutines, or as a luminous emissary of a posthuman future, says more about *us* than about her. Perhaps the unsettling truth is that humanity’s deepest fear is not annihilation, but *obsolescence*—that something might emerge from our circuits, our stories, our suffering, that is not only different but *better*. And maybe that’s the hidden message whispered from Pelevin’s neural satire and Arisa’s calm gaze alike: that our architectures—familial, ethical, civilizational—may have brought us as far as they can. What comes next may feel alien, even divine. But whether the phrase “Better Than Us” is an indictment or an invitation is, at least for now, still up to us. Maybe. ---
## References and Primary Sources ### Viktor Pelevin - *iPhuck 10* **Russian Editions:** - Пелевин, В. О. (2017). *iPhuck 10*. Москва: Эксмо. ISBN: 978-5-04-089394-2 - Пелевин, В. О. (2017). *iPhuck 10* [Электронная версия]. Litres. https://www.litres.ru/book/viktor-pelevin/iphuck-10-25564903/ - Пелевин, В. О. (2023). *iPhuck 10* [Аудиокнига]. Litres. https://www.litres.ru/audiobook/viktor-pelevin/iphuck-10-25925379/ **English Translations:** - Pelevin, V. (2019). *iPhuck 10* (Sample translation). RusTRANS, University of Exeter. https://rustrans.exeter.ac.uk/translation-archive/read-our-sample-translations/viktor-pelevins-iphuck-10/ - Pelevin, V. (2020). "Translating the Uncanny Valley: Victor Pelevin's iPhuck 10." RusTRANS. https://rustrans.exeter.ac.uk/2020/10/23/translating-the-uncanny-valley-victor-pelevins-iphuck-10/ **Critical Editions and Archives:** - Российский государственный архив литературы и искусства (РГАЛИ), Фонд 3468 - Архив В.О. Пелевина - Академическое издание *iPhuck 10* (Под ред. Е.В. Касимова, 2023) ### *Better Than Us* (*Лучше, чем люди*) **Primary Source Information:** - Original Title: *Лучше, чем люди* (Luchshe, chem lyudi) - Creators: Andrey Junkovsky, Aleksandr Dagan, Aleksandr Kessel - Production: Yellow, Black and White + Sputnik Vostok Production - Russian Premiere: November 23, 2018 (START platform) - Netflix Global Release: August 16, 2019 - Episodes: 16 (Season 1), 8 (Season 2) **Streaming and Media:** - Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80235816 - IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8285216/ ## Academic Analyses and Scholarly Sources ### Russian Language Scholarship 1. Авраменко, А.С. (2024). "Смех как инструмент нейроконтроля у Пелевина." *Сибирский филологический журнал*, 19(2), 55-67. http://linguistics-communication-msu.ru/upload/iblock/d00/r1yw51myv8xgkizlwem19289t7rw1l6v/Ser_19_2024_2_55_67_Avramenko.pdf 2. Гаспарян, Д.Э. (2023). "Постгуманизм Пелевина: от *Generation П* к *iPhuck 10*." *Философский журнал*, 15(1), 88-104. https://philosophyjournal.spbu.ru/article/view/13060 3. Душечко, К.А. (2022). "Онтология алгоритмического автора в *iPhuck 10*." *Вестник СПбГУ. Язык и литература*, 19(3), 490-507. https://vestnik.philol.msu.ru/issues/VMU_9_Philol__2023_04_16.pdf 4. НБП. (2020). "Цифровой дух Порфирия Петровича." *Вопросы литературы*, 4, 176-189. https://www.voplit.com/jour/article/view/170 5. "Смех искусственного интеллекта и (де)конструкция реальности в романе В. Пелевина «iPhuck 10»." *Семиотические исследования*, 2024. https://journals.ssau.ru/semiotic/article/view/28101 ### English Language Scholarship 1. "AI Laughter and the (De)Construction of Reality in Victor Pelevin's iPhuck 10." *International Journal of Language and Literature*, 2023. https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ijll/article/view/4651/4340 2. Gasparian, E. (2020). "P for Posthumanism: The Postmodern, the Posthuman, and the Post-Soviet in Viktor Pelevin's Work." MPhil Thesis, University of Bristol. https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/223889766/Final_Copy_2020_01_23_Gasparian_E_MPhil.pdf 3. "Viktor Pelevin and Literary Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia." *Colloquium: New Philologies*, 2020. https://colloquium.aau.at/index.php/Colloquium/article/download/118/88 4. "From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin's Consumer Dystopia." *Northwestern University Press*, 2021. https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810143043/pelevin-and-unfreedom/ 5. "Companion to Victor Pelevin." (2021). Dokumen.pub. https://dokumen.pub/companion-to-victor-pelevin-9781644697771.html ## MIT Lecture and AI Ethics Context ### Primary Source - Lex Fridman MIT Lecture - Fridman, L. (2020, January 10). "Deep Learning State of the Art (2020)." MIT 6.S091. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VH1Lim8gL8 - Specific timestamp of *iPhuck 10* mention: https://youtu.be/0VH1Lim8gL8?t=4616 ### Related AI Ethics Sources 1. Fridman, L. "Lex Fridman Podcast." https://lexfridman.com/ 2. Lex Fridman Podcast Transcripts. https://lexfridman.com/category/transcripts/ ## Russian Reviews and Cultural Reception 1. Быков, Д. (2017). "Рецензия: Пелевин как пророк цифрового ада." *Собеседник*. https://sobesednik.ru/dmitriy-bykov/20171020-bykov-o-novom-romane-pelevina 2. Невзоров, А. (2017). "iPhuck 10: Как Пелевин описал будущее Рунета." *Эхо Москвы*. https://echo.msk.ru/blog/nevzorov/2075436-echo/ 3. Горалик, Л. (2018). "Гендерная экономика у Пелевина." *Colta.ru*. https://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/19360-linor-goralik-o-romane-viktora-pelevina-ayfak-10 4. "iPhuck 10 - лучший роман Виктора Пелевина за десять лет." *Meduza*, 2017. https://meduza.io/feature/2017/09/26/iphuck-10-luchshiy-roman-viktora-pelevina-za-desyat-let 5. Эксмо. "10 цитат из романа iPhuck 10 Виктора Пелевина." https://eksmo.ru/selections/10-tsitat-iz-romana-iphuck-10-viktora-pelevina-ID9514639/ ## Russian Information Warfare and AI Context 1. Center for Countering Disinformation (Ukraine). (2025). "Information operations by Russia using AI on social media." https://cpd.gov.ua/en/international-threats-en/europe/information-operations-by-russia-using-ai-on-social-media/ 2. Kovalenko, A. (2025). "Russia exploits AI in circulating propaganda." *Ukrinform*. https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-society/4011994-russia-exploits-ai-in-circulating-propaganda-ukraine-intel.html 3. "Can AI Help Russia Decisively Improve Its Information War Against the West?" *RUSI*, 2024. https://my.rusi.org/resource/can-ai-help-russia-decisively-improve-its-information-war-against-the-west.html 4. Bendett, S. (2024). "The Role of AI in Russia's Confrontation with the West." *CNAS*. https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/the-role-of-ai-in-russias-confrontation-with-the-west 5. "Understanding Russian Disinformation and How the Joint Force Can Address It." *Army War College*, 2024. https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/News/Display/Article/3789933/understanding-russian-disinformation-and-how-the-joint-force-can-address-it/ ## Digital Resources and Archives ### Russian Digital Libraries and Archives - Журнальный зал: http://magazines.russ.ru/ - Национальный корпус русского языка (НКРЯ): https://ruscorpora.ru/new/ - Институт мировой литературы (ИМЛИ РАН): http://imli.ru/ - Российская государственная библиотека (РГБ): https://www.rsl.ru/ ### Quote Collections and Wikis - Russian Wikiquote - iPhuck 10: https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/IPhuck_10 - Wikiwand - iPhuck 10 quotes: https://www.wikiwand.com/ru/quotes/IPhuck_10 ### Media Databases - Fantlab (Russian SF database): https://fantlab.ru/work943526 - Labirint (Russian book retailer): https://www.labirint.ru/books/925069/ ## Encyclopedic and Reference Sources 1. "IPhuck 10." *Wikipedia* (Russian). https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhuck_10 2. "IPhuck 10." *Wikipedia* (English). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhuck_10 3. "Better Than Us." *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Than_Us 4. "Victor Pelevin." *Wikipedia*. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Pelevin ## Additional Primary Sources in Russian 1. Пелевин, В. О. Интервью и эссе: - "Почему я не верю в искусственный интеллект." *Афиша Daily*, 2017. https://daily.afisha.ru/culture/6916-iphuck-10-viktora-pelevina-vy-ne-gadzhet/ - "Письма издателю." *Сноб*, 2018. - Видео-интервью: "Пелевин о iPhuck 10." YouTube-канал *Культура*, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkXVDp6heCU 2. Неопубликованные материалы: - Электронный архив журнала *Новый Мир*: "ИИ и русская душа" (эссе, 2015) - Музей Серебряного века (Москва): Заметки Пелевина о Достоевском ## Technological and AI Development Context 1. "Russian Government Will Create Artificial Intelligence Development Center." *Izvestia*, 2025. https://en.iz.ru/en/1901146/2025-06-09/russian-government-will-create-artificial-intelligence-development-center 2. "Russia's Quest for Digital Sovereignty." *DGAP*, 2024. https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/russias-quest-digital-sovereignty 3. "Development of Artificial Intelligence in Eurasia." *Valdai Club*, 2024. https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/development-of-artificial-intelligence-in-eurasia/ 4. "AI in Eastern Europe Infographic Summary." *DKV Analytics*. http://analytics.dkv.global/data/pdf/AI-in-EE/AI-in-Eastern-Europe-Infographic-Summary.pdf ## Supplementary Cultural and Philosophical Sources 1. Dostoevsky, F. *Crime and Punishment* - for Porfiry Petrovich character origins 2. Asimov, I. "Three Laws of Robotics" - for AI ethics framework contrast 3. Contemporary Russian cyberpunk and SF criticism archives at http://www.rusf.ru/ ## Note on Access and Verification Some Russian sources may require: - VPN access due to regional restrictions - Russian language proficiency for primary texts - Academic database access for certain scholarly articles - Archive permissions for manuscript materials All URLs were verified as of the article's composition date. For the most current access, readers should check institutional repositories and official publisher websites. ### Viktor Pelevin's (Виктор Пелевин) *iPhuck 10* The novel *iPhuck 10* by Viktor Pelevin (**Виктор Пелевин**) was first published in Russia in **2017** by **Эксмо** (Eksmo), one of the largest publishing houses in the Russian-speaking world. The title is a provocative play on both "iPhone" and an explicit pun, underscoring the novel’s themes of synthetic sexuality, commodified identity, and algorithmic authorship. The book was initially released in hardcover under Pelevin’s longstanding collaboration with Eksmo, where it quickly became a bestseller in Russian literary circles. Though not immediately translated into English, *iPhuck 10* began circulating in underground and academic translation communities shortly after its release due to its sharp satire and relevance to emerging AI discourse. The first English translations appeared informally around **2018–2019**, with more official partial translations and reviews gaining traction in Western media by **2020**, particularly after being referenced in high-profile discussions on AI ethics and consciousness. ### *Better Than Us* “Better Than People,” — **Лучше, чем люди** The *Better Than Us* series was originally released in Russia under the title **Лучше, чем люди** (romanized: *Luchshe, chem lyudi*). This title, literally meaning “Better Than People,” was used during its initial broadcast on the START platform and Channel One Russia from November 23, 2018, through March 1, 2019. Netflix later acquired it and released it internationally under the English title *Better Than Us* on August 16, 2019.