A recent popular article from Vox: Silicon Valley’s vision for AI? It’s religion, repackaged.
AI is in a whole lot of news stories. Pursue any one story in detail, though, and it disappears. Sometimes, as you learn more detail, it reveals practices of data analysis and interpretation for specific purposes. Those purposes are as diverse as all human purposes: design a drug? Sure! Design a bomb? No problem. Deal with intractable human problems? Fire away.
It would be lovely to dismiss the AI hype as hype. But we are imaginative creatures. And there are very many of us. AI is as real as the realm of demons was in 12th Century Paris. They were real enough then, though they are no longer real to us. We have our new shiny demons to keep us happy.
What many demons, spirits, promises and fears are invoked when AI is mentioned? Prior to class, you will scour any media you like to find out interesting and revealing aspirations and fears that arise when AI is invoked. We will be sensitive to at least the following issues:
AI and the structures of society: AI interferes with jobs. AI creates jobs. AI changes jobs. (Jobs, it is worth pointing out, are not a natural kind.)
AI unseen: In invoking AI, we are necessarily forced to associate the term with the manifest wonders of ChatGPT and digital image creation. Given the underlying technologies, this is drastically misleading. The same techniques used to create images are used to scour data by spy agencies, to engineer parts for oil refineries, to calculate market movements, to optimize shipping. What effect do the flagship examples have on the imagination, and how do they influence the AI whirlwind?
AI and the end times. How does AI feature in apocalyptic narratives? What are our apocalyptic narratives?
AI and privilege. What you see as AI I may see differently. Who gets to label anything as AI, and what happens when that happens? Looking into the Mechanical Turk and the human labour involved in training algorithms will be important here.
What transcendental pipedreams are in play? Transhumanism? Immortality? The Singularity? AGI?
[Source] “TESCREAL stands for “transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism (in a very specific context), Effective Altruism, and longtermism.” It was identified by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specialising in existential threats to humanity. These are separate but overlapping beliefs that are particularly common in the social and academic circles associated with big tech in California. Prominent advocates on the transhumanist and AI side include Ray Kurzweil, a notable technology evangelist and AI researcher at Google, philosophers Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and going back a long way earlier, Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose writings brought Russian Cosmism to America. Sam Bankman-Fried is an outspoken advocate of Effective Altruism, another element of this overlapping web of beliefs. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, as noted, both seem to be heavily influenced by Tsiolkovsky’s advocacy of space colonization. Musk’s Neuralink venture, attempting to pioneer human brain-computer interfaces, seems intent on making mind uploading workable, which in turn points to the influences of Kurzweil and other singularitarians. And hiding behind these 20th and early 21st century thinkers are older influences—notably the theological speculation of 19th century Russian Orthodox priest Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov.”
Exercise: what is the difference between an Artificial General Intelligence (fictional) and a truly alien intelligence (say, in the octopus)?
What do our many brain theories have to do with this? Are there repercussions for cognitive neuroscience? Is there a need for reining in some orthodox claims? Have we cognitive scientists caused unnecessary panic? Are we alleviating it?
Interdisciplinary Challenges 