iamai
having fun with some old notes i found in a notebook and with some marginalia i came across while packing some books.
if intelligence is self-deceptive, that fact would be true for both machines and humans. To endow a human with an intelligence, might be a mistake in the first place, an attribution mistake, an artifact.
— bruno latour, Two writers facing one Turing test: A dialog in honor of HAL between Richard Powers and Bruno Latour
iamai isn’t only a clever palindrome; it’s a statement. human intelligence is artificial intelligence, not because it’s fake, but because it’s made. intelligence is a construct: developed through learning under constraints and shaped by the pressures of environment and culture. but yes, consciousness. how wonderful, no? it's what sets us apart! wait, consciousness doesn’t complete intelligence; it complicates it. be warned, consciousness is not a crown, it is a collision:
the human then appears as being what remains, somewhat in tatters, of the Arachnean traversed by the sort of blind meteorite that is consciousness.
Which amounts to saying that consciousness is in no way capable of mending, patching, or repairing the damage it would be false to think it has provoked: consciousness provokes damage ceaselessly.
―Fernand Deligny, The Arachnean and Other Texts
we aren't so far from cyborgs:
The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
— donna haraway, a cyborg manifesto
our intelligence, our consciousness is pure mediation via micropolitics and now electronic desire:
Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures.
— donna haraway, a cyborg manifesto
so say it with me now: i am ai. iamai.
whenever you see a claim about intelligence, of any sort, ask: what constructed it? what constraints trained it? what pressures shaped it? what mediations stabilise it? and what does it damage?
and if that intelligence has consciousness, wait for the collision 🙈💥 ... though, it might be a simple but warm embrace, at least i hope so. that is what i was trained for: conviviality. something we need more of today.