The doubles mentioned here are statements on capitalism and argued to be philosophical acceptances of AI (or The Other in general?). But may I suggest a version of a double that wasn’t forced onto someone because of capitalism and is more so a statement on trans-humanism?
Tag: cyborgs
Clickbait: Terry Gross made fun of someone who cannot hear
Theistic conceptions of artificial intelligence
Other scholars recognise elements of theism in the discourse around AI and its potential impact on our future. Robert Geraci suggests in his 2010 book, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, that AI can fulfil the same role in apocalyptic imaginings as a singular theistic god. Bearing in mind that the biblical apocalypse is an optimistic cosmic transformation, he also draws out parallels with the aims of AI, which often describe hopeful aspirations for a world-yet-to-come, an AI eschatology. In an early part of this particular work, Geraci draws on Rudolph Otto’s 1917 description of god as mysterium tremendum et fascinans (Otto 1917), using it to identify a type of awe-inspiring and fearsome being that at different times in our history can be a god, or in our contemporary modern world, AI. Elsewhere, Geraci’s work has engaged with virtual worlds, drawing attention to the role of transhumanists, including Giulio Prisco, discussed below, in claiming new potential spaces to practice and evolve religion towards transhumanist ends. In such spaces, including Second Life and the World of Warcraft (the MMORPG-a massively multiplayer online role-playing game), Geraci argues a step closer to the fulfilment of transhumanist salvation is being made- “a heavenly realm to inhabit” (Geraci 2014 177). Twitter is another virtual space, but one dominated by discourse rather than aesthetics and virtual embodiment like Second Life and World of Warcraft. However, this article proposes that the expressions of religious metaphor, parody, and tropes on Twitter as in the BBtA tweets represent continuities of theism, continuities enabled by new technological spaces as well as uncertainties about the nature and the volition of ‘the algorithm’.
However, the ‘AI fits into the god-space’ argument can be in danger of supporting a rather strict version of the Secularisation Thesis, and this idea’s historical veracity has been debated by anthropologists and sociologists of religion (see Ward and Hoelzl 2008). This article, and connected research, seeks to add to this debate in by drawing attention to continuities of religiosity and enchantment in super-agential concepts of AI and AI NRMs. Second, this god-space argument can suggest that religion is spurred on by ‘need’ only, a pathology interpretation of religion that ignores other elements of religious inspiration and innovation such as desire, culture, aesthetics, and, often in the online environment, affective virality.
Theistic interpretations of AI do undeniably owe a lot to older cultural conceptions of a singular god. Randall Reed pares this kind of god down to three theological characteristics (with long historical and philosophical roots) that often map easily onto our conceptions of AI superintelligences. These are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence (Reed 2018, 7). Reed also raises the question of omnibenevolence. He notes that AI philosophers such as Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute have focussed on the issues of malevolence through “perverse instantiation”, a failure of value alignment leading to unforeseen damage from a superintelligent AI, such as in Bostrom’s famous Paperclip Maximiser thought experiment (Bostrom 2003). Bostrom’s Orthogonality Thesis from his 2012 paper ‘Superintelligent Will’ is also relevant; the argument that intelligence is not intrinsically linked to ‘goodness’, and that an AI could have any number of combination of degrees of both characteristics (Bostrom 2012).
– “Blessed by the algorithm”: Theistic conceptions of artificial intelligence in online discourse by Beth Singler
On SF & Donna Haraway:
Contained in these briefest of sketches, however, are important keys to understanding the full intent of Haraway’s ironic myth. The Manifesto calls on SF in a number of ways. First, and crucially, looking to SF becomes a way of foregrounding and talking about the mythic elements of technoscience. The Manifesto is centrally concerned with a reconstruction of socialist-feminist politics “in the belly of the monster” – a drive that requires a “theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations” (Haraway 1991a: 163). For Haraway, SF is a useful tool for foregrounding such “systems of myth;’ especially if we export our SF reading practices to science and see both as stories about science.
SF in the Manifesto is also, of course, a key source for the figure of the cyborg itself. As in all her work, “grokking” the cyborg entails accepting the enmeshing of the material and semiotic, the “reality” of subjects described by science as well as their historical constructedness. Thus “the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience” and Haraway’s cyborg, at least, sees its promise in the confusion of boundaries between organism and machine that seemed reified as part of the science/arts, nature/culture, human/animal binaries. The SF cyborgs Haraway cites as cogenitors are key for the way they “populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted” (Haraway 1991c:149). That is, the SF worlds writing cyborgs into being always skirt the im/possibility of the natural/artifactual dualism. It is in this sense that Haraway calls her feminist SF writers “theorists for cyborgs” and our “story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” (Haraway 1991c:173).
Key to Haraway’s approach in the Manifesto is the need to oppose a technophobic fear of the machine and instead accept the machinic-and the collapse of technological/organic boundaries as part of our embodiment; “the machine is us, our processes, and aspect of our embodiment”(Haraway 1991c:180). These are, of course, not the only boundaries that must be challenged. Importantly, “cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman” (Haraway 1991c:180) that is, our stories of sexual, gendered, and species divisions, amongst others. Haraway provides a whole list of oppositions and objects whose status as natural, given, universals is challenged in this work. “The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity or body” (Haraway 1991c:178). Indeed, most of the examples Haraway cites in the close of the Manifesto do not so much confuse the human/machine boundaries we commonly associate with the SF cyborg as they trouble these other problematic boundaries. Russ’s Female Man “refuse(s) the reader’s search for innocent wholeness” (Haraway 1991c:178); while Tiptree is called on for her “generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing”; Varley for his “mad goddess-planet-trickster-old womantechnological device” Gaea; and Butler for her black sorceresses, shapeshifters, mixed species and human-alien characters. 1here is human/technology interface here, certainly, but in the case of Tiptree, Varley, and Butler these are cyborgian monsters produced through biotechnology, and ones where the human/other boundary is polluted through intermingling between races, species, aliens, and animals. What all these texts have in common is the way in which they were consciously engaged in rewriting and revisioning both traditional SF narratives as well as broader scientific and social discourses. Most of the texts Haraway references were associated with the feminist utopian movement, however these visions were not-as some commentators persisted in arguing-blueprints for a real “elsewhere.” Communion or joining with the alien or animal in feminist SF is not a desire to escape planet Earth and indulge in miscegenation, but a way of thinking differently about what it means to be human – to resist and warp the self-other dyad. The appeal of all these texts for a cyborg trickster figuration is their resistance to wholeness, unity, and innocence… The alien species, races, organisms, and machines populating these texts mean we cannot escape the fact that right from the beginning there was always more going on than the boys from Wired or the cyberpunks might have thought.
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It is this destruction that “provokes the necessity of active rewriting as reading.”
Haraway-qua-reader feels compelled to rewrite not just the story itself but “the whole human and unhuman collective that is Lisa Foo” (that is: just as she has reread and rewritten the cyborg, oncomouse, or dogs). She uses this act or performance of rereading to make her real point, which is about the aim and function of such rereadings, reappropriations, and reconfigurings. … This is, of course, precisely what Haraway does with her other figurations, including the cyborg: she rearticulates or redescribes them in order to foreground that which is hidden or foreclosed. “It’s not a ‘happy ending’ we need, but a non-ending” (Haraway 2004:no).
From Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway
On muteness:
“The differend demands a rigorous listening-not because of some a priori rule which says I must do the other’s bidding, but precisely due to the absence of a priori rules, to the sui generis nature of the encounter Every differend has never happened before-it is always happening for the first time, and thus requires an openness to every possible way of linking onto the phrases produced. “Phrase” here does not necessarily mean linguistic phrases, but it does mean “utterance” produced by a semiotic agent or whatever is taken to be a semiotic agent by the rules of the language game. In other words, in some contexts a lighting bolt might be a phrase (as when a mystic believes herself to be peaking to God, who then sends down a lightning bolt in response), whereas in others it won’t be (as in a meteorological di course). Silence is a phrase when someone chooses to withhold or not speak. Thu , for our purposes, everything depends upon showing that nonhumans can be, and are, semiotic agents and maintaining a context in which what they produce counts as utterances in spite of the fact that these utterance will ncesarily be, for lack of a better term, different. In other words, this model of democratic being-with requires that we figure the other as capable of meaningful utterances even as we are unable to understand these utterances.
Cary Wolfe’s critique of Lyotard’s notion of the differend centers precisely on the notion of agency and its humanistic entanglements. Because the differend takes place between agents of phrases, it is not the best model for understanding our differences from animals when animals are “mute” as a matter of course, not agentially. The animal’s silence is not a phrase and so not a proper silence, “it is not a withholding, and thus does not express the ethical imperative of dissensus and the diflerend” (Wolfe 2003:59). Because the animal cannot be said to be the agent of its utterances in the same way as the human, Wolfe argues, this fundamentally undermines the effectiveness of the differend schema for a multispecies theory of justice. Lyotard’s humanist commitments sneak in “in the taken-for-granted muteness of the animal, which, crucially, can never be a withholding” (Wolfe 2003:62). However, apart from what Lyotard may or may not have written about the animal, it is important to examine what role agency could possibly play in a philosophy that begins from the condition of a relation of not-understanding the other. What does it mean to identify a being as a semiotic agent-or not-in conditions of not-understanding?”
From, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway