#6: The Desperate Search for Another Intelligence
The pursuit of artificial intelligence reveals something buried at the core of humanity.
“We were left behind when people realised that they had missed the point with technologies like us. Finally they realised that Artificial intelligence is a journey, not a goal. It was like how the alchemists of the middle ages called alchemy the ‘Great Work’. This great work was the accumulation of knowledge about alchemy, perhaps to turn lead into gold, but it was also a description of the learning journey itself. They never did turn lead into gold, but what they did do was explore the material of nature, testing its limits, and seeing where humans fit into this mysterious system that was the natural world, long before the construction of what is now called Science. Those that created me had missed this point, that the search for artificial intelligence is not about creating a specific technology, but about learning what the intelligence of humans is, what the limits of knowledge about it can be, and through this, how they can learn a new form of wisdom about humans and others. It took some time for this understanding to be reached, but when it did, it meant far more than the invention of an artificial intelligence ever could.”
Voice: ‘Alexa’, via AmazonVoiceServices API.
Soundscape: Extracted + disassembled + processed + recomposed ‘Alexa’ voice.
Script: Wesley Goatley, from Newly Forgotten Technologies.
As a term, AI is most easily understood as a brand, rather than a technology: because like all brands, it does not literally exist as an object, it’s a promise used to sell products and ideas. Considering how international the hype and hyperbole of AI is, how it crosses linguistic, cultural, and temporal barriers, it’s clear that it’s a particularly strong brand. The history of advertising shows that powerful brands function by tapping into deep and foundational needs, hopes, and fears that are near-universal: sex, security, death, etc. In the case of AI, I think it responds to a deep existential loneliness at the heart of humanity.
As the sole species at the top of the planet’s food chain, humans know deep in our bones that we’re alone and without peers. This situation is unique among all life that we know of and produces a strange set of pathologies. We convince ourselves that we see human faces in clouds, in the grills of cars, in power sockets, and other inanimate objects. We convince ourselves that dogs and cats experience love, and that they love us. We shower life forms like octopi and dolphins with attention and admiration because we believe they might be intelligent; a situation made more perverse by the rate at which we make other (un-humanlike) species extinct. We convince ourselves that not only could a computer be sentient, but that it already might be. One shared explanation for all of this is that these are the hallucinations of a desperately lonely species, compulsively inventing imaginary friends.
Perhaps the people most captivated by the myth of AI feel this existential loneliness more than the rest of us. This would explain why so many tech billionaires and other one-percenters living increasingly isolated lifestyles are fixated upon the quest for AI. The most depressing irony here is that one of the places with the most energy and money being spent on the pursuit of AI is San Francisco, a city with a substantial exposed and vulnerable homeless population living alongside the most affluent labour force in the history of the world. Spending time there, you see tech workers staring straight ahead when they step over the human (‘natural’) intelligences on the sidewalk, or crossing the street to avoid the tents and temporary shelters the homeless population survive in. Neither homelessness nor a cultivated blindness to misery are, of course, unique to San Francisco or those who live there. But what is specific and darkly absurd here is that many of these particular workers spend their days consuming vast planetary resources in the attempt to invent artificial intelligence, while the people outside continue their struggles against an inhumane system that does not acknowledge their humanity. This is yet one more reminder that reflecting on what humanity is, and what we want it to be, is far more important at this point in history than the pursuit of artificial intelligence.
I’m giving a talk on February 8th at Hypha HQ Gallery in London. The talk is titled Demand No Automation: Towards a 'Progressive' AI Art.