Being Artificial in the Age of Humanity
A detour
I am done with summarizing the main arguments of two out of the five sections of the book Richard and I are writing. Arithmetic will tell you that leaves three more to go. But the best laid plans of mice and men being what they are, I am going to take a detour before I get to the destination. Here are some of the themes I am going to explore while detouring:
Technology: More Than Just Gadgets
When people talk about technology, they usually think of specific gadgets like smartphones and computers. But there's a broader concept, called 'Technics,' that goes much deeper. It's about our constant relationship with the tools we make and use, a process that has shaped us throughout history. It's through technology that we store our knowledge, influence how we learn, and even change how we view the world.
The French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, saw Technics as the core of what makes us uniquely human. We aren't just a biological species; we're constantly evolving alongside the tools we invent. This isn't without risk; technology is like a potent medicine that can both help and harm us. It's up to us to control its development and use it in beneficial ways.
The Power of Technics
If we understand the power of Technics, including political technologies, we can grasp why our societies are structured the way they are. This is the idea Michel Foucault explored, arguing that guns gave rise to a new form of military discipline.
AI takes this transformation even further. It allows for surveillance and control that was once unimaginable. It's changing the 'rules' of violence and conflict, which has many of us deeply worried about our future. With technologies like AI-powered drones, the lines between soldiers and civilians blur dangerously. Conflict becomes ever-present, as even the safety of one's home provides no respite from the reach of the war machine. It's foolish to think that this kind of power will be limited to distant conflicts. Understanding the concept of Technics is key to navigating these challenges.
Artificiality at the Core of our Being
When we talk about Artificial Intelligence, it's easy to focus on the intelligence part. But remember, AI is both commodity and social relations, and therefore, it reflects and reinforces relationships of power. These aren't local relationships, either -- they're earthwide. This is the 'planetary condition' we inhabit today.
To understand the full picture of AI, we must rethink what we mean by 'artificial':
Humanity and the artificial go hand-in-hand. It's always been part of who we are, so demonizing AI as an outside threat is a mistake.
Our planetary ecological crisis is also a result of this large-scale artificiality.AI and climate change are both byproducts of the way we interact with the planet.
Computing and AI might actually provide a useful language to untangle the complex relationships behind both technological and ecological crises.
AI represents a pinnacle of human-driven change on a planetary scale. It's a powerful manifestation of 'Technics' and the Anthropocene era where the lines between nature and what we create are forever blurred.
The detour was triggered by reading this article about Bernard Stiegler's work and its reference to Technics as central to the human way of being. Stiegler didn't invent that term, in fact, an even more famous intellectual, Lewis Mumford, made that term popular in the first half of the 20th century. Mumford's book on Technics and Civilization is back on my reading list, but it's the article on Stiegler that convinced me that engagement with earlier conceptions of Technics is crucial to our understanding of AI. He saw technology as shaping our very being. AI isn't just about devices; it's reshaping how we relate to the world. It alters how we access knowledge, potentially impacting our memory and learning. Like a potent medicine, AI holds both promise and peril, requiring us to consciously guide its development.
In the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler, "Technics" goes beyond the common understanding of technology. Here's a breakdown of what it means:
Technics vs. Technology
Technology: Often refers to specific tools, devices, and systems (e.g., smartphones, computers, AI algorithms).
Technics: Encompasses the broader process of how humans create, use, and evolve alongside tools. It's about the ongoing relationship between humans and the material world, including the social, cultural, and historical context that shape the development of tools.
Technics is the ever-evolving dance between humans and the tools we create. It explores how this relationship shapes our history, culture, and even our sense of self. For Stiegler, what makes us uniquely human isn't a biological trait, it's our dependence on technics. Unlike animals bound by instinct, we've thrived by inventing and adapting tools. In that sense, our tools become extensions of ourselves. Technics also acts as a kind of external memory. From ancient cave paintings to the vast libraries of the internet, our tools store and transmit knowledge, fundamentally influencing how we learn and remember.
Crucially, Stiegler saw Technics as a potent medicine, "pharmacology," capable of healing or harming. Tools aren't neutral; they shape our world and how we interact with it. Stiegler believed understanding the power of Technics was key to shaping a better future. It's about becoming conscious creators of technology instead of being mere consumers, allowing us to steer its development in positive directions.
Once Technics - and its associated mechanisms of power and control - became lodged in my mind, I started seeing it everywhere. Like in this essay by Foucault on power, where he says:
With these two objectives, I believe that we can roughly grasp the great technological mutation of power in the West. We have the habit – once again according to the spirit of an ever so limited Marxism – of saying that the great invention was, as everyone knows, the steam engine, or at least inventions of this sort. It is true, this was very important, but there was an entire series of other technological inventions just as important as this one and which were, in the last instance, the condition of possibility for the functioning of the others. Thus it was in political technology; there was an invention at the level of forms of power throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Consequently, we must not only make a history of industrial techniques, but also that of political techniques, and I believe that we may group the inventions of political technology under two great chapters, and for these inventions we must credit, above all, the 17th and 18th centuries. I will group these political technologies under two great chapter headings because it appears to me that they were developed in two different directions. On the one hand, there was this technology that I will call “discipline.” Discipline is basically the mechanism of power by which we come to exert control in the social body right down to the finest elements, by which we succeed in grabbing hold of the social atoms themselves, which is to say individuals. Techniques for the individualization of power. How to monitor (surveiller) someone, how to control his conduct, his behavior, his aptitudes, how to intensify his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him in a place where he will be most useful: this is what I mean by discipline.
AI brings the two sides of Technics together: the political technology and the commoditized intelligence. You can see that in +972's incredible reporting on the use of AI by Israel to perpetrate violence bordering on genocide (or maybe crossing the border). This is one of the more disturbing pieces I have read in a year filled with demoralizing developments. Beyond the specifics about the ongoing conflict, it also gives us a glimpse about the future of AI driven control, which includes surveillance, war, governance etc, an impending phase transition in the mechanisms of power.
We often think of moral boundaries as fixed, like in the infamous phrase: guns don't kill people, people kill people. But it's a lot easier to kill people with guns, and having guns on hand changes the incentives for those who have them. In fact, guns change the entire apparatus of violence and created a new form of martial discipline that didn't exist before. As Foucault says:
I cited for you the example of discipline in the army. It is an important example because it was truly the site where the great discovery of discipline was made and developed in the first place. Linked then to this other invention of a techno-industrial sort that was the invention of the gun with a comparatively rapid fire. Basically from this moment on, we can say the following: the soldier was no longer interchangeable, was no longer pure and simple cannon fodder [chair à canon] – a simple individual capable of doing harm. To be a good soldier, he needed to know how to shoot; therefore he had to undergo a process of apprenticeship. It was necessary that the soldier equally know how to move, that he know how to coordinate his movements with those of other soldiers, in sum: the soldier became something skillful. Ergo, something valuable [precieux]. And the more valuable he was, the more he had to be preserved; the more he had to be preserved, the more necessary it became to teach him the techniques capable of saving his life in battle, and the more techniques he was taught, the longer this apprenticeship, the more valuable he became. And suddenly, you have a kind of rapid development of these military techniques of training [dressage], culminating in the famous Prussian army of Frederic II, which spent most of its time doing exercises. The Prussian army, the model of Prussian discipline, is precisely the perfection, the maximal intensity of this corporeal discipline [discipline corporelle] of the soldier, which was, to a certain extent, the model for other disciplines.
Drones are to our times that guns were to the 18th century. Machine learning driven mechanisms of control are changing the moral calculus for those wielding these instruments, and will soon change the entire apparatus of violence. Every glimpse I get into this calculus makes me fearful of our future. "Bellum omnium contra omnes" or War of All against All, was a phrase used by Thomas Hobbes to describe (in his words, not mine) the State of Nature, a world in which humans live without any laws or government. It was one of the thought experiments on the way to the Leviathan, which many have feared as a precursor to the totalitarian state of modern times. Hobbes dystopia became real in Total War, which is very much a modern invention, characterized by three key aspects:
All-Out Mobilization: In a total war, entire societies are geared towards fighting. This means mobilizing all resources, manpower, and industry to support the war effort. There's a complete shift in priorities, with civilian needs taking a backseat to military demands.
Targeting of Civilians: Unlike traditional warfare where there's a distinction between combatants and civilians, total war often blurs these lines. Civilians and civilian infrastructure can become legitimate targets. This can involve siege warfare, starvation tactics, or even mass atrocities.
Unrestricted Warfare: Total war tends to disregard limitations on the types of weapons used. This can include chemical weapons, biological weapons, or any tactic seen as effective in achieving total victory.
Proponents of AI in warfare might claim that it will prevent total warfare, since it will allow precision targeting of belligerents and leave everyone else alone. But as the war in Gaza shows, AI will make total warfare even worse. In earlier forms of total warfare, you could hide in a shelter when the sirens blared and bombers flew over your head and then get back to your regular lives in between raids. But the surveillance capacities of AI and constant presence of drones means that there's no respite from war: it's ever present and will target you and your family when you're most vulnerable. This war machine marries the interests of the largest state and corporate actors, and will come for us all sooner or later unless we do something about it. I have no clue what that something might be, but a deeper understanding of Technics is key.
For the longest time, I thought the real challenge is in understanding the "Intelligence" in Artificial Intelligence, but I am coming around to thinking that it's the "Artificial" in Artificial Intelligence that poses challenges.
AI is marketed as 'intelligence as commodity', which is why we are asked to focus on the Intelligence half of AI, but as any Marxist will tell you, the commodity form is actually a form of social relations. But social relations is so 19th century: every time you see that phrase, you should replace it with 'planetary relations,' for that's the condition we are in today. And that's why we have to understand what 'Artificial' means in our planetary condition. What I am here to tell you is at the true meaning of the Artificial in Artificial Intelligence will only become clear when you realize that:
The artificial isn't outside the human - it's in fact at the heart of what it is to be human. Externalizing the artificial and turning into an alien threat is a conceptual and practical error.
The Anthropocene is artificiality at planetary scale. Both the climate crisis and AI are consequences of planetary artificiality.
Computing may give us the right language to describe and explain the planetary relations at the heart of AI as well as the ecological crisis.
Let me end with a few words from Benjamin Bratton’s work on planetary computation:
Antikythera configures computation as a technology of the “planetary,” and the planetary as a figure of technological thought. It demonstrates, contrary to much of continental philosophical orthodoxy, that thinking through the computational mechanism allows not only “mere calculation,” but for intelligence to orient itself in relation to its planetary condition
AI is peak Anthropocene
