Re: <nettime> FWD: The Copy Far "AI" license (fwd)

[Gary Hall via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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?

Or is the human born out of - and hence shaped by - its relation to 
technology (among other things)? Here, technology is what makes the 
human possible in the first place, language being the most obvious 
example. For many anthropologists, what we understand as the human 
emerged with the use of tools. Without these tools, and without language 
especially, the ability of humans to communicate and engage in the kind 
of complex thinking that makes them 'human' would be significantly limited.


On 02/10/2023 10:56, Felix Stalder via nettime-l wrote:
> On 10/2/23 10:38, mp via nettime-l wrote:
> > On 10/2/23 07:33, Christian Swertz via nettime-l wrote:
> > > But I would really like to learn more about the idea that an AI
> > > might be free. I've heard this quite often, but never understood
> > > the concept. Can somebody help me?
> >
> > It could possibly have to do with the concepts of the "earth rights 
> > movements", which seek to decenter the perception and legal treatment
> > of "the environment" from the "white colonial gaze" where humans,
> > starting with "the White Male", is on top and in the centre and most
> > important, and where everyone and everything else is subordinate.
>
> While I'm in favor of expending rights to non-humans (animals, plants, 
> ecosystems), I'm quite opposed to doing the same to technology.
>
> This, as far as I can see, is a false symmetry.
>
> The main reason why this is a false symmetry concerns a the question 
> of autonomy and with that, any notion of non-human self-hood. A tree 
> doesn't need humans to exist and from that you can assume that there 
> is an element of "treeness" that is beyond human utility. To preserve 
> that, against the Western, colonial tendency of "thingification", as 
> Aimé Césaire put it, the extension of rights might be the next best 
> thing to dismantling the Western notion of individual rights altogether.
>
> Technology, including contemporary technology such as AI, is 
> fundamentally different from trees. Even if a certain degree of 
> 'stochastic freedom' is built into it, technology is not, and cannot 
> be, autonomous. That would amount to a perpetuum mobile. And, more 
> than that, technology is fundamentally utilitarian. You might fall in 
> love with ChatGPT, but if OpenAI decides that providing the bot to you 
> no longer fits their business model, you're out of luck. That doesn't 
> mean that people are always fully in control, thousands of people die 
> everyday because people are not in full control over their cars, but 
> that doesn't make care somehow beyond human control.
>
> As Joanna Bryson recently put it: "An AI system independent of humans 
> is the ultimate shell company, purely an available hiding place for 
> corruption by the human agencies that set it in place."
>
> https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2023/09/a-very-short-primer-on-ai-ip-including.html?m=1 
>
>
> One might put it even stronger: To claim that an AI system is 
> independent of humans, is to create the ultimate shell company...." 
> And we definitely do not need more rights for shell companies. 










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