James Bridle

Beyond Human Intelligence

Ways of Being

alexi gunner

In this, corporate AI does have one commonality with the natural world - or rather, with our false, historical conception of it. It imag- ines an environment red in tooth and claw, in which naked and frail humanity must battle with devastating forces and subdue them, bend- ing them to his will (and it is usually his) in the form of agriculture, architecture, animal husbandry and domestication. This way of seeing the world has produced a three-tiered classification system for the kinds of animals we encounter: pets, livestock and wild beasts, each with their own attributes and attitudes. In transferring this analogy to the world of AI, it seems evident that thus far we have mostly created domesticated machines of the first kind, we have begun to corral a feedlot of tha cocnA nd we live in fear of unleashing the third.

The science fiction writer Charles Stross likens our age of corporate control to the aftermath of an alien invasion. Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teem- ing workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pur- sues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance Stross writes. We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals, 13

Radimir Bitsov

Perhaps we should be thinking more carefully about the ecosystem in which we are raising AI, particularly the kind of aggressive, domineering and destructive forms which seems to be proliferating. That these systems are overly concerned with profit and loss, winning and Iosing, control and dominance, suggests that their ecological niche - the slice of the environment shaping their evolution - is somewhat narrow. Their learned responses are that of a corporate intelligence, evolving within the arid, airless ecology of neoliberal capitalism, tech company boardrooms and everincreasing financial and social dis- parities. If we wish them to evolve differently, we will need to address and alter this ecology.

In this thought, I believe, resides the real promise of 'artificial' intelligence. That is to say, if intelligence, rather than being an innate, restrictive set of behaviours, is in fact something which arises from interrelationships, from thinking and working together, there need be nothing artificial about it at all. If all intelligence is ecological - that is, entangled, relational, and of the world - then artificial intelligence provides a very real way for us to come to terms with all the other intelligences which populate and manifest through the planet.

…there are many ways of doing intelligence: behaviourally, neuro- lowically, physiologically and socially. This bears repeating: intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does; it is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.

Intelligence is one among many ways of being in the world: it is an interface to it; it makes the world manifest.

…Turing suggests something else: that intelligence might be multiple and relational: that it might take many different forms, and that it might exist between, rather than within, beings of all and diverse kinds. The oncoing nonularity of the Turing Test for artifcial intelligence.

The world is made up of subjects, not objects. Everything is really everyone, and all those beings have their own agency, points of view and forms of life. The more-than-human world demands our recognition, for without it we are nothing.

Technology is the last field of study to discover its ecology. Ecology is the study of the place we find ourselves in, and the relationships between its inhabitants, while technology is the study of what we do there: (techne), or craft. Putting it that way makes them sound like natural bedfellows, but the history of technology is largely one of willful blindness to the context and consequences of its enactment.

Karolina

Randomness assigns value to everything and everyone it touches by giving cach participant equal weight: everything is equally valuable. In this, randomness is inherently political and inherently empowering. Randomness means and makes sure that every thing nmatters: I matter, vou matter, we all matter together.

The project of decentralization also encompasses the process of decentring ourselves: the acknowledgement that humans are not the most imnportant species on the planet, nor the hub around which everything else turns. Decentring is a complex task which requires us to think deeply about our relationships with the more-than-human world, and to understand our actions and the tools which we create as contributions to, and mediations with, everything else, instead of as unique, and uniquely powerful, artefacts of human superiority.

The moment the real world is completely abstracted into the universal machine is when we lose our ability to care for it.

The world is not like a computer; computers are like the world.

We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to comnputation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutability and a moral impunity. 

From this error flows all kinds of violence: the violence which reduces the beauty of the world to numbers, and the consequent violence which tries to force the world to conform to that representation, which erases, degrades, tortures and kills those things and beings which do not fit within the assumed system of representation.

To make a model is to abstract and represent: it is an act of distancing from the world. But the world is already here, it's right in front of us. We are suspended within and soaked in it: we are inseparable from it.

In information technology, as in evolutionary biology, it seems that the more we try to control and categorize the world- to stuff everything into little boxes and lines in databases - the more of life spills out.

What we perceive as borders and conflicts the things which separate us - often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world - but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in our logbooks and measuring instruments. The truth is always stranger, more lively and more expansive than anything we can compute.

Fully recognizing that non-human plants, animals and others have their own worlds which are fundamentally different and unknowable to us is to begin to end human exceptionalism and human supremacism. Humans are not at the centre of the universe.

The very existence of other worlds, of numerous overlapping worlds in which many kinds of things and many ways of seeing and being are possible, should thrill us. Other worlds are not only possible, they are already present. The acknowledgement of multiple other worlds, the worlds of others, is key to disentangling ourselves from from our greatest social and technological deception, and re- entangling ourselves with a more meaningful and compassionate cosmology.

This decentring, an admission that the human race is not the only game in town, does not correspond to any reduction of our world. Rather, as when we extend the virtue of intelligence to other beings, the addition of plant worlds to our own enriches both.

Intelligence is relational: it matters how and where you do it, what form your body gives it, and with whom it connects. Intelligence, then, is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes.

We tend to imagine AI as embodied in something like a robot, or a computer, but it can really be instantiated as anything. Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, and the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That's a description of an AI - it's also a description of a modern corporation.

After all, the captains of digital industry, the beneficiaries of the vast wealth that technology generates, have the most to lose in being replaced by super-intelligent Al. Perhaps they fear artificial intelligence because it threatens to do to them what they have been doing to the rest of us for some time.

Ways of Being Beyond Human Intelligence

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