The only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
This interview with AA Cavia, a “philosopher of computation” is a tough read in places as it’s so semantically dense. Nevertheless, this section I’ve excerpted at the end makes a really good point: what counts as ‘creativity’ changes over time, and future creativity is likely to involve significant amounts of AI.
That means instead of Luddism, we need to find other ways of organising against Capital. Not trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
This decentering of the human should not be conflated with dehumanizing tendencies that center capital, empire or the war machine over human welfare. It’s instead an invitation to develop new norms with which we can rethink the human and its place in our intellectual tradition, so I see it as a political project with emancipatory potential.
Seen through this lens, AI is a project of transition of the human, a transgression encoded into its origins in Turing’s imitation game, a test which machines should not be seen to pass, but which instead humans are inevitably set up to fail. And in this failure of self-recognition I see some positive potential. In this sense, the only alignment problem I think we should be tending to is that between humanity and capital, a conflict in which computation has been weaponised.
In this regard, I reject narratives which posit a total subsumption of computation, or indeed any paradigmatic technology, under capital. If we look at the backlash against AI, which pits human creativity against generative models, it appears to be guided by archaic notions of creativity, which suffer from residues of said twentieth century humanism. As a result of this discourse, Luddism is rampant, particularly in the academic left. Even a cursory reading of the philosophy of technology, take Simondon’s discussion on the dualism of organism and mechanism as taken up by Yuk Hui, will suggest a completely different way of approaching such questions.
The notion of authorship has been shifting continuously throughout human history of course, and the answer is never to down tools and protect what we have, but rather to forge new tools.
As creative practitioners, there are many ways I think we should be organizing against capital, including new ownership and rights models, but Luddism isn’t one of them. The history of art and the history of technology are one and the same; they are intricately braided. Without the invention of a technique such as oil painting we wouldn’t have Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece. Art is hatched in that friction between human experience and technical practices. On this point I would take heed of Rimbaud’s advice: one must be absolutely modern.
If contemporary reality feels like a season in hell, the only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
Source: Le Random
Image: Elise Racine