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

[Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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


--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
--
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: https://www.nettime.org
# contact: nettime-l-owner@lists.nettime.org