The central goal of ecological ethics today is to understand not just how beings live, evolve, and die alongside one another, but that there are whole interior worlds of beings living, evolving, and dying alongside one another. There is thus huge value in asking these kinds of speculative questions — questions which imply that “The World” as a hegemonic singular is now in the rearview mirror, left behind in a town called Modernity (which, as it turns out, is a rather pedestrian little suburb sitting alongside a much more immense metropolitan cosmos). What we have instead are multiple interlocking ecological worlds only ever partially available to one another where viruses, symbionts, bacteria, predators, and companion species are obtusely breaking one another open; from a certain perspective the situation looks like an ongoing ontological car-jacking, except the cars, criminals, and victims are constantly turning into one another.

The Rubicon Has Been Crossed, Adam Robbert.

Robbert’s turn of phrase above here is excellent, and like all good uses of analogical language, it leaves the reader’s own potential for thought intact. I just came across this while having a browse of his Knowledge Ecology page, fortuitously at the same time as I am thinking about some contradictions inherent to the object-oriented perspective as articulated by Harman et al. Still haven’t thrown myself into Quentin Meillassoux‘s After Finitude, which has been on my ebook-shelf for a few months now, but I may leave that until I have worked out some of my nascent thoughts on this before somebody else’s analysis blind-sides me into silence.

Iamus and algorithmic art: a response

Rick Searle of the ever excellent Utopia or Dystopia (go, subscribe!) wrote a comment to my previous post, and I found my reply getting too long to justify it merely being a comment, so I am placing it here instead. The text of the comment is as follows:

I am curious as to your thoughts on this:

Yesterday, in honor of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, an orchestra in Europe performed a piece of music that had been entirely created by an AI:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/01/iamus-computer-composes-classical-music

They actually live streamed the performance and I took the chance to listen to it. I am not a great classical music fan, but the piece seemed haunting and beautiful, and the more I reflected on it- a little creepy.

Here was this beautiful piece of art produced by an algorithm completely empty of any emotional life that was nevertheless able to have an emotional effect on me.

It struck me that the one of the questions we have to address when creating these things is not what will the world be like if we create machines that are like humans, but what will the world be like the intelligent machines we create are not like humans at all, and at the same time better, potentially incredibly better, than humans in those very things that we have up to now used to define ourselves?

Individuality is unnecessary for intelligence

Computers + artificial intelligence + robotics will not lead us where techno-ideology prays it will. We will not have an android like Data, who will be able to do all the things that we can, only better. To manage to do all that we can, such a technological entity would need to be as versatile, robust, and massively parallel as we are. This might be achieved via incredible inefficiency, or via some form of biological route. The former disqualifies itself from the running, if we are to require that this is to be a project undertaken on a large scale, to augment our reality via an alternative, artificial intelligent life-form of our own making which would be an addition to our existence. The latter is basically growing another, harder, better, faster, stronger version of ourselves, and falls under trans-/post-humanism.

The alternative is to allow technology to do what it does best: allow tools to be excellent at what it is that they are for. This gives specificity, where all the energy and computation is given focus. Let these tools do these tasks amazingly well and without distraction, and then we have a start. Admittedly, this sounds like the Adam Smith view of technology as mass-produced, mono-function widgets. Smart-phones seem to be a counter-example to my throw-back to the industrial revolution.