Yuk Hui’s Axio-Cosmology of the Unknown: Genesis and the Inhuman (original) (raw)

AI and the Perverse Core of the Technological Age

Sabah Ülkesi, 2019

The article analyzes the emergence of Artificial intelligence and the phantasms that it provokes from a historical, literary, and philosophical perspective. It begins with Heidegger's critical understanding of information theory and how this leads up to Hubert Dreyfus's work in What Computers Can't Do and his critique of strong AI. These earlier debates are then connected to current concerns with super-intelligence and so called singularity theory, in Bostrom and others. It argues against taking seriously the much debated notion of "singularity", which it instead displays as a phantasy arising from within the perverse core of the technological imagination. The text was commissioned by the Turkish cultural Journal Sabah Ülkesi, 58 (2019), where it was published in a Turkish translation.

Special Issue Histories of AI A Genealogy of Power Ali et al (Eds)

BJHS Themes, 2023

Like the polar bear beleaguered by global warming, artificial intelligence (AI) serves as the charismatic megafauna of an entangled set of local and global histories of science, technology and economics. This Themes issue develops a new perspective on AI that moves beyond conventional origin myths – AI was invented at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, or by Alan Turing in 1950 – and reframes contemporary critique by establishing plural genealogies that situate AI within deeper histories and broader geographies. ChatGPT and art produced by AI are described as generative but are better understood as forms of pastiche based upon the use of existing infrastructures, often in ways that reflect stereotypes. The power of these tools is predicated on the fact that the Internet was first imagined and framed as a ‘commons’ when actually it has created a stockpile for centralized control over (or the extraction and exploitation of) recursive, iterative and creative work. As with most computer technologies, the ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ that these tools promise also depends on a loss of agency, control and freedom for many, in this case the artists, writers and researchers who have made their work accessible in this way. Thus, rather than fixate on the latest promissory technology or focus on a relatively small set of elite academic pursuits born out of a marriage between logic, statistics and modern digital computing, we explore AI as a diffuse set of technologies and systems of epistemic and political power that participate in broader historical trajectories than are traditionally offered, expanding the scope of what ‘history of AI’ is a history of

'Tis Twenty Twenty-Three—and Techno-Fascist Singularity Is Here

Interrogating AI: The Promise, the Problems, the Future (Cognitive, Engineering, Psychological, Philosophical, Consciousness, and Science-Fictional Perspectives), edited by Alex S. Kohav, 2024

Few would argue against the assertion that today we have become a technological society. This essay endeavors to unpack the meaning and some of the consequences of this observable fact. First, the traditional division of the human self into an inner domain and an outer persona is now more and more heavily weighted toward the latter. The mind’s very interiority and subjectivity—privacy—is now being breached daily, routinely, and effortlessly by AI-enabled devices, amounting to a tyrannical manipulation of broad populations. The techno-fascist singularity has arrived. Second, the “posthuman” cyborgs are being applauded as the coming “overhuman” by some, who echo the early fascists and futurists, such as Marinetti, who celebrated the “beauty of speed” and machinery’s superiority to human capabilities. Third, technology’s emphasis on purposefulness and functionality, with their resultant “skewed sample of the events of the total mind” (Bateson), distorts our grasp of reality. The schema outlined by Rousseau and elaborated by Derrida—stretching from gods (or kings) to beasts or cattle, with human beings somewhere in the middle—is now tasked with accommodating AI-powered robots, too. Are robots going to be more like cattle or, perhaps, akin to gods? That robots can’t be human, the chapter argues, can be surmised from that which is impossible for AI-driven robots to attain: consciousness. The chapter further explores the intimate connection between AI and both psychology and cognitive science, identifying cognition as the foundation underlying the notion of intelligence in all three of these domains. Yet such an intelligence, being devoid of consciousness and relying on algorithms to achieve superior cognition, information processing speeds, and virtually unlimited working memory, cannot possibly engage in real thinking predicated on something other than algorithms or swift decisiveness. Since the overarching aims of cognition and AI alike are achievements of specific goals—among them survival and the thriving of the agent doing the cognizing—the relegating of humans to the status of cattle seems inevitable.

Speculative machines and us: more-than-human intuition and the algorithmic condition

Cultural Studies , 2022

In the wake of Turing’s ‘universal machine’, this article foregrounds intuition as a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures. As a mode of sensing, knowing, anticipating, and navigating the world that exceeds rational analysis, intuition is, I will argue, vital to attuning to our contemporary ‘algorithmic condition’, in which machine learning technologies are actively re-distributing cognition across humans and machines, transforming the nature of (in)human experience, and rearticulating questions of cultural value and desire. The article focuses on three key historical moments which enable us to retrospectively glimpse an emerging condensation of interest and urgency concerning our changing relationships with ‘new’ technologies in Britain and North America – 1) 1950s: The birth of AI and cybernetics; 2) 1980s: The rise of the personal computer and software cultures and; 3) 2010s: Inhabiting algorithmic life. In each period, particular aspects of intuition surface as significant in animating our affective and cultural entanglements with computational technologies. While intuition has gained affective traction at particular historical junctures as both what essentially defines ‘the human’ and what has become essentially inhuman, I argue that addressing the sensorial, socio-political, cultural, and ethical issues current machine learning architectures open up requires attuning to immanent human-algorithmic entanglements and the techno-social ecologies they inhabit and recursively reshape.

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (2019, Pluto Press)

Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (2019, Pluto Press), 2019

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. The authors explore the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches to thinking about AI, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. The book poses a counterview against left accelerationaism and Operaismo thinkers, arguing that a deeper analysis of AI produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI will render humanity obsolete or turn it into a species of transhumans working for a wage until the heat death of the universe; a fate that is only avoidable by communist revolution.

We’ve always been antagonistic: algorithmic resistances and dissidences beyond the Global North

Media International Australia, 2022

In this article we suggest that otherwise unacknowledged histories of technological antagonism can help us (artists, activists, and researchers) to more deeply appreciate the foundations on which we develop activist resistances to contemporary computing. Departing from the case of Brazil, our goal is to bridge historical and contemporary perspectives by: (1) discussing the everyday practises of technological dissidence in the country, and how appropriation has been used to resist unequal power structures; (2) presenting how particular tactical ruptures in the history of art and media activism have sought to contaminate and re-envision networked technologies; (3) exploring the particular notions of algorithmic antagonism that two contemporary projects (PretaLab/Olabi and Silo/Caipiratech) advance, and how they relate to their historical counterparts. In sum, these different threads remind us that we’ve always been antagonistic, and that recognizing a longer genealogy of technological...

2023 - Semiotics of the Black Box: On the Rhetorics of Algorithmic Images

2023

The article critically analyzes the semiotic pathways through which the new aura of algorithmic images is constructed, an aura which stems not so much from what they represent nor from how it is represented but from the halo of mystery surrounding the very productive genesis of such images. Even their creators, from their super-technological laboratories, claim that they cannot fully grasp their emergence from artificial intelligence. Analyzing these statements in depth, as well as the attempts that these same laboratories conduct to ‘unravel’ the mystery of the algorithmic images that they themselves fabricate and disseminate, however, one is seized with the suspicion that this mystery and aura are not due to intrinsic technical causes, but rather to the particular socio-rhetorical context in which digital and technological frontier knowledge is produced today, especially in relation to artificial intelligence. The “black box” so often evoked to translate the inexplicability of artificial intelligence visual products might therefore be nothing more than a rhetorical device to protect and enhance the real black box, that of productive and industrial secrecy. In this whole process of algorithmic construction of the aura, then, the rhetoric of the unknowable image intercepts and highjacks a very long-standing trend in human cultures, in which images are precisely delegated the semiotic task of circulating the sense of a mysterious, ungraspable, and unfathomable meaning.

The Becoming of AI: A Critical Perspective on the Contingent Formation of AI

This chapter offers a critical perspective on the contingent formation of artificial intelligence as a key sociotechnical institution in contemporary societies. It shows how the development of AI is not merely a product of functional technological development and improvement but depends just as much on economical, political, and discursive drivers. It builds on work from STS and critical algorithm studies surfacing that technological developments are always contingent on and resulting from transformations along multiple scientific trajectories as well as interaction between multiple actors and discourses. For our conceptual understanding of AI and its epistemology, this is a consequential perspective. It directs attention on different issues: away from detecting impact and bias ex post, and towards a perspective that centers on how AI is coming into being as a powerful sociotechnical entity. We illustrate this process in three key domains: technological research, media discourse, an...