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Thursday, February 15, 2024
Machine Minds and Neo-Ludditism, part 2
Your blogger returns to Medialab in Madrid to soak up some practical creative thinking around the advent of Artificial Intelligence. The “Synthetic Minds” event was a fun afternoon with lots to chew on. Foremost for me was an artwork from the new analytic movement of “critical AI studies”, a formidable early result in that scholarly front. And a proponent of neo-Ludditism, an engineer against the steam hammer. (Guarantee: No AI used in the writing of this post!)
Trevor Paglen gave the keynote talk I blogged in the last post here. It anchored a program of short-term residencies at Madrid’s Medialab Matadero called “Synthetic Minds”. These developent projects teamed artists to use AI in new works. I attended some of the presentations of fledgling works in progress, along with talks by the groups’ mentors.
The first evening was disappointing, but I shall not dish. The mentor of this group was into a kind of technomysticism, and the projects concerned mermaids and an AI “basilisk”. I’d call this the Netflix development team. Artists gotta eat.
The second evening was more to my taste. It was kicked off by curator Bani Brusadin, who I’d met at the dinner after Trevor Paglen’s talk. In his talk, Brusadin referenced a posted January ‘24 discussion on the state of AI development at the WEF at Davos. Ugh: “We have way too many things for us to think about and work on when we think about what can make the most money,” says Kai-Fu Lee. This ur-capitalist encounter group talks about the “vast automaton” with its “hidden decisions” that is being built. (“Computer says ‘no’.”)
Brusadin compared this build-up to the earlier revolution in logistics – container ships, Amazon distribution centers. He reached back to Victorian-era thinkers, and cited Charles Babbage on the autonomy of machines. My notes were fast and now barely llegible, but I’ll note that searching on one term he mentioned, the fiction genre of AI horror, is a thing. “Hal” is the Mae West of the genre.
To confront this emergent basilisk, let’s say, whose glance turns (has turned) us all into data, Brusadin declared that we need a new conception of a public sphere. This can be built from “what refuses to be computed”, the overall relationship between the synthetic and the factual. This is a struggle to define what is real and what is possible.
Anatomy of an AI system (Joler and Crawford, 2018)
He cited Laura Tripaldi's '22 book Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials on "state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotech". This feminist engineer gives examples of data app results which escape their models. Brusadin also pointed to the extensive series of podcasts generated by the Medialab program on their website.
Xenosocialist World-Building
A lot of the discourse in these presentations was about intelligences – animal, vegetable, mineral – that escape human and human-modelled AI comprehension.
The first project presented was a science fiction future, positing “feral AIs” and “AI spirits” resulting from the “implosion of a massive dataset” in 2054. (Animal minds and spirituality are un-computable.) The voice of “xenosocialism” is a pirate radio station out to free us all. Sounds cool, very Cory Doctorow. The object of it is to “take the burden of emancipation off of our human shoulders”. If only.
Another project team had built compact run-around devices with a rather fuzzy object of discovering “Latent Intimacies”. They strapped one onto a cat who slinked around the Matadero complex.
There was (is?) a bunch of other stuff (see links below), but the mind-blower for me was mentor Vladan Joler’s presentation of the new map “Calculating Empires”, a “critical cartography of technology and power” (2020).
Joler showed tiny detailed images then zoomed in to comprehensive, indeed massive charts of the development of AI on multiple levels. Joler built this with collaborator Kate Crawford.
The Map Is the Territory
There’s nothing like big maps and colorful charts to give the idea that massively complex systems as they are pictured can be comprehensible. I’ve been entranced by this illusory kind of understanding since the periodic table in my high school chem class. The work of Mark Lombardi and Bureau d'études, and the fabulous chartings of the Iconoclasistas are always a thrill to encounter. That’s art; that’s modern iconography.
"Nuestra Señora de la Rebeldía", by Iconoclasistas (2011)
“Calculating Empires” is a masterwork of the genre. One tweet praised it as life-changing: @NataliaStanusch tweeted: "Overwhelming in the best of ways." The show inspired her to start a PhD on AI and media studies.
AI studies departments are springing up quickly in academic institutions. I’ll guess that many of those which are not engineering courses come out of game design curricula. The ones that come from media studies sectors are taking a more hard tack big picture approach to an emergent technology that is, as Dan McQuillan wrote, "the steam hammer of limited imagination, a solution to problems defined in administrative offices and enforced through predictive boundaries".
Calculating Empires infographic, a small detail
Critical AI Studies
Dan McQuillan, a lecturer at Goldsmiths in London and author of Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, is one among a new crop of critical AI researchers.
I found him by searching “Is there an actual AI agent of political resistance?”. That is the question the Xenosocialists answer in fiction.
In podcasts, McQuillan talks about how "AI as an essentially political technology", an "amplification of processes already underway". And, as Joler’s super-chart demonstrates, the outcome of long waves of historical developments. In his book McQuillan asks "what would this way of doing things exaggerate?"
He is far from the only scholar developing a new Ludditism as techno-politics. He points out those original mill-spikers were experts in the machines they sought to destroy. Ergo, an operational understanding of AI is necessary to be able to critique it effectively.
The host of the podcast (@machinekillspod) is studying the development of the insurance industry, and compared the mutual aid societies of the Victorian era which co-existed with the rise of the actuary. “There is no ethic of care” in insurance, it’s just about distribution of risk. Ditto AI. Not here for you, but for your boss.
As Vladan Joder and Kate Amstrong’s mega-map makes clear, AI which relies on the scrapings of the internet to understand human culture has picked up all the bad epistemological habits of the past – racism, coloniality, sexism – and brutality of all sorts which dances on our screens in a demoralizing daily round.
The $64K question is, can there be an AI for liberation? Who is building it? The answer is to come in the next xenosocialist pirate radio broadcast. But let’s not wait for 2054.
LINKS
Medialab Matadero, LAB#03 SYNTHETIC MINDS (ES & ENG)
https://www.medialab-matadero.es/en/programs
Project "channels":
https://www.are.na/medialab-matadero/channels
talk: Davos discussion, "The Expanding Universe of Generative Models"
Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2024/sessions/the-expanding-universe-of-generative-models/
Bani Brusadin
https://www.cccb.org/es/participantes/ficha/bani-brusadin/37757
The Chronicles of Xenosocialist AI
https://www.medialab-matadero.es/en/projects/chronicles-xenosocialist-ai
"Anatomy of an AI System" visual map
The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources
By Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2018)
https://anatomyof.ai/
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, 2022
https://knowingmachines.org/publications/calculating-empire
This announcement of the Milan exhibition includes a closeup of the map, showing the density of detail
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/573730/calculating-empires/
talk: “Refusing the Everyday Fascism of Artificial Intelligence (ft. Dan McQuillan)” on This Machine Kills; @machinekillspod #186.; with Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr.
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/186-refusing-the-everyday-fascism-of-artificial-intelligence-ft-dan-mcquillan
text: This new book is a taste of the new scholarly front:
Tiziano Bonini, Emiliano Treré, Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power (The MIT Press, 2024). “How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives.”… “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate our behavior.”
is available open access:
https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14329.001.0001
talk: Another fun lecture from the COVER project at Essex U in UK:
James Muldoon, "Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power"
https://youtu.be/kp_BDpt9beA
This paper theorises how a system of coloniality underpins the structuring logic of artificial intelligence systems....
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Machine Minds and Neo-Ludditism, part 2
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Your blogger returns to Medialab in Madrid to soak up some practical creative thinking around the advent of Artificial Intelligence. The “...
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