On 10/2/23 12:37, Gary Hall via nettime-l wrote:
I wonder, doesn't that rather raise the question of whether humans are
themselves autonomous?
Is there is an original, pre-existing, human subject that then comes
into contact with a technology that is completely external and foreign
to it, and is merely used as a tool by autonomous humans for
instrumental, utilitarian purposes?
On 10/2/23 21:12, John Hopkins via nettime-l wrote:
Humans are neither autonomous (as in 'closed systems'), nor is any
technology 'completely external' to any particular human if you you
consider the nature of reality as a completely connected and
continuous field of flows.
On 10/3/23 09:20, Christian Swertz via nettime-l wrote:
Maybe I can add another question: "Autonomy" in the meaning of
"ability to think rationally" is not restricted to human beings in
some Western notions
When I wrote about living things having "autonomy" I did not mean it in
the liberal sense of a stable, fully-formed individual interacting with
the natural and cultural environment. Humans are clearly not distinct
from one (as John pointed out) or the other (as Gary pointed out). I
also didn't imply a capacity for rational thought, whether restricted as
to humans or extended beyond them (as Christian alluded to).
What I meant was a relational sense of autonomy of living entities
vis-à-vis humans, meaning that there is something in living entities
that goes beyond, is prior to, cannot be expressed, by this
relationship. To reduce this relationship to human utilitarianism, to
turn them into things, is an act of violence and a defining operation of
colonialism. That was what the reference to Cesaire implied.
Technologies clearly do not possess this quality, That doesn't mean that
they don't shape human culture (and human beings) or are not themselves
part of the geo-biological cycles (they clearly are as any mine, data
center or landfill can attest), but the relation between them and humans
is a different one. It is, beneath forms of fetishization, and an
utilitarian one. A means to an end. And in capitalism, we know what the
end is.
On 10/2/23 12:42, Joseph Rabie wrote:
At the beginning of this discussion was a post by Edward Welbourne,
for whom the question of AI rights is contingent to the eventuality
of it becoming sentient. This aspect appears to have slipped from the
discussion.
I dropped that quite deliberately, because I don't know what to do with
it. Given the state of technology, ML systems are clearly not
intelligent (though they are powerful and astonishingly capable).
I fully agree with Matteo Pasquinelli, that the history of AI is better
read as labor-encoding technology than as a quest for intelligence or
sentience.
https://mediatheoryjournal.org/review-matteo-pasquinellis-the-eye-of-the-master-reviewed-by-alex-levant/
So, it bring up sentience and all the things that this would imply
(world domination, as recent open letters argued), feels either
misguided or disingenuous (in the case of the open letters), a way of
distracting (intentionally or not), from the actual problems at hand and
setting up shell companies for laundering power or bias as Ted referred to.
Felix
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