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

[Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Folks,

thank you Felix for the synopsis and clarification. (In a message that 
slipped by a few days ago, the question of the ontological status of 
technology already came up; here's an occasion to add the following 
remark to the thread.)

I cannot give a sufficiently informed explanation, but I believe that 
the status ascribed to technical things is crucial in this debate 
(Simondon, Stiegler, Hui, can you help me?). Are technical things 
products of the human mind, or is the human mind itself a product of our 
existence as technical beings? Can technical things gain independence in 
the systems/environments in which they "exist"?

(I cannot help but think of the main switch or the electricity plug 
which is, as far as I'm concerned, the ultimate sign of inevitable 
dependency; of course animal bodies, incl. humans, are also dependent on 
their environments, but under Earth-surface circumstances they can go on 
for days, some even weeks or months without food or water...)

Is the hypothetical 'granting of rights' to, as Francis calls them, 
systems of Enhanced Pattern Recognition, an ontological challenge (for 
all of us), or rather an ethical challenge (for those of us who ascribe 
a form of potential subjecthood to such technical things)?

I agree with Felix et al. on this, that the claim for 'granting such 
rights' smacks of a distraction from human power politics.

Regards,
-a


Am 05.10.23 um 11:38 schrieb Felix Stalder via nettime-l:
> 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 
> > consider the nature of reality as a completely connected and
> > continuous field of flows.

<snip>

> 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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