<nettime> Further on Swipe

[Michael Benson via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Brian and Nettimers:

So I have never actually read Lynn Margulis, but am tangentially aware of
her contributions (and should read her; apart from 'Five Kingdoms' I wonder
if anyone can recommend a key text? 'Symbiotic Planet' maybe?...). In any
case I have been embedded in the research and collections complex of the
Canadian Museum of Nature since late 2018 (with a two year break to allow a
certain rampaging RNA virus to extend across the planet). And one friend
here, Paul Hamilton, has spent his life researching diatoms. So we have had
occasion to discuss some pretty complex questions over the last few
years, including regarding symbionts. And in fact a number of the
dinoflagellates that I am approaching (as an image-maker first, but with
keen curiosity also as to their evolutionary story, or why would I be here
in the first place) exhibit explicitly endosymbiotic properties. Sometimes
on multiple levels.

Incidentally I'm not entirely sure "How not to be parasitic to the point of
necrotrophy?" works, by definition. Aren't organisms that feed off living
tissue biotrophs? While those that eat dead tissue are necrotrophic... So
presumably parasites are biotrophic. (But I am far from being an expert on
these questions.) Speaking of which, there is a large poster with some
rather gruesome photographs of lamprey 'faces' in the hall here,
illustrating the work of a pair of researchers. The title is "Factors
Affecting the Fecundity of Lampreys." This struck me as being so ripe for
parody that last year I asked Chat GPT to give me some variations on Gilbert
and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General," as applied
to this question of the fecundity of lampreys. And I got some pretty good
results:

I am the very model of a lamprey's fecundity
A parasitic creature with a most unusual proclivity
I latch onto my host with a sucker, oh so gloriously
And feed upon their vital fluids with a fierce tenacity

I'll spare you any more....

Concerning the evolution of complex cells and the symbiotic merger of
bacteria to produce the elaborate single cells we are comprised of, but
that after following different evolutionary pathways also swarm in fresh
and salt water, proliferate in damp soil, and even the air, living
essentially almost everywhere on the planet, see this intriguing piece from
just a couple days ago in Popular Science:

https://www.popsci.com/science/two-lifeforms-merged-into-one/

....which in turn is translating a paper published in Science:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk1075

The upshot is that we have now observed a relatively contemporaneous
example of lifeforms merging in an endosymbiotic way. Something directly
comparable to what we take to be the first time tat happened, billions of
years ago, producing organelles and thus complex cells. "The engulfed
endosymbiont becomes an organ for the host called an organelle."

Which brings me to my own provisional attempt to answer my own question
concerning of what Zarathustra spake and the role of AI as Other, or Other
Other -- or maybe something simply existing within the nested forms
extending across space and time that constitute Nature.

Isn't it possible to imagine that should an "artificial" super-intelligence
be created out of all the accumulated knowledge amassed by human beings
across our entire history -- a process fueled by hyper-capitalistic &
tribal competition that would seem to be well underway -- isn't it possible
to imagine that in effect it is us who will become the engulfed
endosymbiont? That we organic humans will in effect be kept around and
utilized as part of the larger superorganism, because we have certain
properties of use to the resulting superorganismic entity? Similar come to
think of it to the idea you read in the Anthropocene Review, based on
Lovelock and Margulis's hypothosis?

I don't think this violates the Gaia hypothesis one bit. In fact it raises
the question of the eventual potential establishment of interstellar Gaia
structures. Why do I say this? Because our organic evolutionary stage of
development, with such pesky irritating limitations as, you know,
_mortality,_ not to mention vulnerability to such long-duration spaceflight
problems as cosmic ray hits to our DNA, and many other issues, isn't
ideally suited to such interstellar explorations. But our extended
exploratory feelers don't need to be organic. They could of course be AI
"staffed" interstellar missions. (In fact we are already engaging in this
pursuit with increasingly automated interplanetary robotic spaceflight,
something I've written about fairly extensively.)

This was something that Kubrick and Clarke were also getting at more than
fifty years ago with "2001: A Space Odyssey." Both with those cryptic
representatives of an alien intelligence, the opaque monoliths, and also
HAL-9000. And they in turn got many of their concepts from some of the best
people working on AI in the Sixties, key figures like Marvin Minsky and I.
J. Good. (The latter BTW worked as a cryptologist with Alan Turing at
Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Certainly Turing himself would
have been consulted, had he still been alive. To paraphrase Arthur: I would
have advised Alan to move to Ceylon.)

For example, one thing so far missing from the silicon- and energy-hungry
AI current arms race (mind-race?) is the implications of quantum
supercomputing. Last year I was invited to give a talk at the IBM research
campus in Yorktown Heights, NY, named after Thomas J. Watson. And they took
us in to see their existing Quantum System One computer -- then told us to
turn our phones off, and took us further into a secure area where they were
building their next-generation quantum machine. And it is possible that a
marriage of rapidly evolving AI algorithms with quantum computing
potentialities will result in the much-vaunted singularity...

Taking us back once again to Nietzsche's suggestion in Also Sprach Zarathustra
that we are the ones dancing on the tightrope between ape and ubermensch --
"a bridge and not a goal."

Could it be that we are in effect emergent endosymbionts as a
super-intelligence that cwouldn't exist without our work emerges, and
incorporates our efforts within its interstellar ambitions?

Just asking!

Best,
Michael

-- 
Michael Benson
*Kinetikon Pictures *
michael-benson.net
kinpix2001@gmail.com
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