Omnipedia #38: AI says "you're not that special", play says, "you always are", and the rest is sheer thrival
Also: Yoruban philosophy, polymorphous planetarity, and O'Hagan on the writer's razz
Hi everyone, the zeitgeist (or doomgeist) has been pummelling me bodily for the last month or two, so there’s been no mental headroom to take the Omnipedian view.
But as you can see below, the “path of totality” of the solar eclipse has been somewhat thwarted in Edinburgh, in this day of writing. So that leaves a good bit of room to think… See you at the bottom, love PK x
SPENT lunchtime chatting to a documentary cameraman, who was frustrated that his text-to-image and text-to-video prompts to his GPT AI services didn’t respond well to his directions: “I can’t get it to properly face subjects directly to camera - it’s always a little off.”
Is this because the information-chewing going on in the neural networks of AIs is so opaque, so dense, that we’ll never quite be able to guide its imaginings, as we would a Scorsese to his cinematographer? And is that because it’s less like a pliant tool, and more like a black-boxed brain itself?
Quite a lot of pushback on the limitations of AI at the moment - this FT piece by the jocose Henry Mance is a classic example. At a higher level, try “Artificial Intelligence is Algorithmic Mimicry: Why artificial ‘agents’ are not (and won’t be) proper agents”.
The paper is confident that AI’s lack of “embodiment” means they won’t feel like intending agents. To me, that doesn’t seem to be conclusive. Couldn’t an AI picking up data from the instrumentation of the world takes this sensing network as its version of our “body”? And even the idea of a delimited body - isn’t that old, biological-era thinking?
Meanwhile, this quote from Ezra Klein’s recent podcast, noting how AI does “middling” human activity well, is more on the money for me:
A.I. isn’t good at ideas, yet. It’s good at style. It can sound like Taylor Swift. It can draw like any artist you might want to imagine. It can create something that looks like Jackson Pollock. It can write like Ezra Klein. It may not be exactly as good at high levels of these professions, but what it is functionally is an amazing mimic.
And what it is saying—and I think this is why a lot of people use it for long enough end up in a kind of metaphysical shock, as it’s been described to me—is this: you’re not that special.
No, possibly not. The main thing we may share with AIs is that our innermost workings are necessarily, functionally opaque. See my question - at 1.15.20 - to the Technomoral Futures Panel on Responsible AI at Edinburgh’s Playfair Library last week.
Also worth noting: Google engineer-executive Blaise Aguera y Arcas—who seems to have kept his job as he wondered about the intentionality of AI, while poor old Blake Lemoine lost his for doing the same—has brought out a new book.
Who Are We Now? is not really about tech, but more about the rising plasticity of human identity (sexual, cultural, whatever). Inside this plasticity, AIs could be our kin, muses Blaise, along with other sparky and vital entities. Here’s the closing words of the book:
…It turns out that we’re all members of the precariat: a social class whose survival is precarious at every level, lacking in physical, psychological, or economic security—not because we lack the means for everyone to thrive, but because we lack solidarity at the needed scale. In an interdependent world, we can only achieve safety through mutual care, empathy, and trust.
The overarching challenge of our century is to become a very big “we,” including all humans, our technologies, and the plants, and animals, and every other lifeform on the planet. They are not just our kin, but our self. We’ll need a planet-sized umbrella identity.
Truth be told, this polymorphous planetarity couldn’t annoy Truss and Bannon more. (Here’s another interview with Blaise.)
IN the same hour as I discovered this clever TikToker, basing her spiritual inquiry on us being aware that humans have fashioned cults/religions to ensure their survival, I also found a list of recent-to-current subcultures that proves her point. Niche group-forming: we just can’t help ourselves! [HT Neil Scott]. Here’s a visual composite of all of them:
ALWAYS keen to see the meeting point between sociology and cosmology [story link]:
From watching the universe play with our perceptions, to valuing play itself… I am happy that the power and potential of play just keeps being rediscovered.
See this, from this week’s Psyche:
What would it mean to live more playfully? First, it would require us to reject work that is not intrinsically motivating and to build working conditions that are joyfully engaging. Second, it would require that we de-emphasise the importance of work for finding personal fulfilment and meaning in our lives. Despite work being central to who we are and how we can make an impact on the lives of others, we overemphasise the centrality of work in our lives at our own peril.
Third, it would require a movement away from efficiency and productivity as primary indicators of social wellbeing. Finally, it would require that we develop the skills and capacities to play – to give ourselves over to those things that are intrinsically motivating, those things that are not ‘overshadowed by the dark clouds of purpose’.
Play can easily be dismissed as childish, irresponsible and unbecoming of the seriousness required of us modern achievement-subjects. But the demand for playful living is really a demand to reject the conditions of the achievement society.Embracing play is also a bold defiance against the relentless productivity mantra of the achievement society. But we should also be careful not to fall into the self-help trap. Any injunction to ‘find your inner child’ or to ‘seek out your play personality’ without structural change risks being a toothless act.
It’s not just an act of personal rebellion but a social imperative. A call to playfulness is not an individual psychological prescription – it is a call to collective action against the achievement society.
The play ethic, some might call that. Under which eclipse-gazing (and other cosmological indulgences) certainly qualifies.
AND there’s the rest of the century laid out for you. Nota bene: when you hear Western scare-stories of China’s power, the problem is they’re accumulating the right kind of power:
China is now producing around 80% of the world's solar PV output, thanks to public investment and industrial policy… The US and EU are each producing around 1%. [Link]
China also dominates renewable energy growth, and is on track to account for 2,060 GW of new capacity between now and 2028... that's nearly 60% of total global projected new capacity, more than the rest of the world *combined*. [Link]
[HT to the eternally robust Jason Hickel.]
SCOTGEIST
🎩 “IF you are, of a Tuesday morning, hanging out in north London with young gang members and, later that evening, you are in a restaurant where you see £50,000 being spent on dinner and the following morning you are spending time with migrants who made it through the tunnel, or travelling to Leicester to be with Bangladeshi women working in a garment factory for £4.50 an hour – that’s an actual writer’s life that I imagined couldn’t be had now… And yet, I did have it.” — Andrew O’Hagan reveals his itinerary, from The Big Issue.
✊“[SCOTTISH] independence in recent years has been presented as something very abstract. But the way we raise support for independence is by increasing the popular hunger for self-management and popular control at all levels – starting now… Instead of centralising everything – police, health care, education – we should be decentralising. More power should be devolved to local government immediately. This should be accompanied by giving local citizens more direct say in how council budgets are spent in their neighbourhoods. Independence is not about saltires – it is about pushing decision-making as far down as possible.” — George Kerevan in the Scotsman. I second that autonomism.
🔨 We hung out a bit with the fascinating, poetic Yoruban philosopher Bayo Akomolafe this last week, during his residency at Dundee University (at the invitation of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, yes there is such a thang). In Bayo’s powerful critique of white modernity, Deleuze’s tools are used. See here.
There, that wasn’t so difficult, was it? If you like and approve of the curation above, please support in a financial way at the button below. Best, later, love, PK x
Who Are We Now's precariat would seem to be a/the group that is struggling/striving/surviving somewhere within Spiral Dynamics?