Rethinking intelligence in a more-than-human world ⊗ The AI unbundling ⊗ The infamous 1972 report

This week →{.caps} Rethinking intelligence in a more-than-human world ⊗ The AI unbundling ⊗ The infamous 1972 report that warned of civilization’s collapse ⊗ Theatre is the life of you ⊗ Filterworld: Algorithm cleanse

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.188 was The form and function of science fiction by Fred Scharmen.

Rethinking intelligence in a more-than-human world

I almost skipped over this one by Amanda Rees at Noema Magazine because although it’s a ‘cluster of topics’ (human intelligence, synthetic intelligence, biological non-human intelligence) I’m paying attention to, I’ve also featured a number of pieces here that are quite adjacent. That would have been a mistake, Rees doesn’t only look at proofs of intelligence in animals, although there is some of that, and she doesn’t only look at how to consider Artificial Intelligence, although there is some of that too. Instead, she focuses on how our view of human agency and intelligence came to be, what this view misses, and how it introduces errors and biases in how we then consider animal and synthetic intelligence. Rees goes over European Enlightenment, “eugenicist Francis Galton,” meritocracy, and how “elite European scholars and gentlemen” used “their own experience as a basis for their studies.”

Beyond the established view of intelligence, what of emotion, play, learning, and stories? Even beyond these angles on how our brains work, Rees also proposes considering collaboration, alliances, plants, multispecies agency, and companion species. Good read, and I’d suggest also going through the archives for Kate Darling{.internal} on robots as animals, and the old but sadly not broadly used idea of using BASAAP{.internal} (Be As Smart As A Puppy) to frame expectations of AI.

==If we are in fact to be “wise,” we need to learn to manage a range of different and potentially existential risks relating to (and often created by) our technological interventions in the bio-social ecologies we inhabit. We need, in short, to rethink what it means to be intelligent.== […]

But again, the idea of what constitutes “intelligence” closely resembles the earlier 19th-century model of rational, logical analysis. Key research goals, for example, focus on reasoning, problem-solving, pattern recognition and the capacity to map the relationship between concepts, objects and strategies. “Intelligence” here is cognitive, rational and goal-directed. It is not, for example, kinesthetic (based on embodiment and physical memory) or playful. Nor — despite the best efforts of Rosalind Picard and some others — does it usually include emotion or affect. […]

==All these debates about intelligence and the human future are based on the assumption that intelligence is fundamentally rational and goal-directed — that is, that the 19th-century understanding of the concept is still the most appropriate interpretation of what it is. What if it isn’t?== And what about agency? What if agency isn’t self-conscious, or even based in an individual? […]

Fairy tales may well prove more useful than factor analysis in understanding human agency in the Anthropocene. This is because stories are vitally important in both explaining and expanding an individual’s understanding of a situation. Particularly in the past decade, the West has seen how stories (myths, post-truths, history) help form collective community identities, which can sometimes exacerbate inter-community tension.

The AI unbundling

I haven’t linked to a Ben Thompson article in a little while, I’m kind of done with the deep dives into big-tech business models, but in this one he’s looking at a current interest of mine, AI models like DALL-E and Midjourney. He starts by describing and detailing his concept of the idea propagation value chain, and the disruption of each level (creation, substantiation, duplication, distribution, and consumption). He argues that, starting at the end of the line, in time each bottleneck was removed, and that these AI tools will do the same for substantiation, leaving only (barely) creation. It’s a good framework to think about this and mayyybe he’s right that “differentiated creators” will “leverage text-based iteration to make themselves more productive and original than ever before,” but will they be able to stay differentiated when copying is so easy? And, as I’ve said before, do most (enough) people care about the difference?

What remains is one final bundle: the creation and substantiation of an idea. To use myself as an example, ==I have plenty of ideas, and thanks to the Internet, the ability to distribute them around the globe; however, I still need to write them down, just as an artist needs to create an image, or a musician needs to write a song. What is becoming increasingly clear, though, is that this too is a bottleneck that is on the verge of being removed.d== […]

[H]ighly differentiated creators, though, who can sustainably deliver both creation and substantiation on their own will be even more valuable. […]

AI-generated images will, per the image above, soon be a flood, just as publishing on the Internet quickly overwhelmed the old newspaper business model.

The infamous 1972 report that warned of civilization’s collapse

At WIRED, a quick interview with Carlos Alvarez Pereira about the 1972 book The Limits to Growth and the ways in which it failed. His conclusion at the very end kind of matches my current thinking, but neither of us knows how quickly it happens.

What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. […]

==So politically, at the level of corporations, at the official level, things are going pretty much in the wrong direction. Culturally, below the line, my bet is that a lot of things are happening in the good direction. The human revolution is already happening—it's just that we don't see it. And maybe it's good that we don't see it yet, until the very moment where it makes a lot of things shift.==

Theatre is the life of you

Drew Austin looks back at some of the articles he wrote for Real Life, and goes a bit deeper on the topic of “how digital technology has gamified reality itself.”

LinkedIn and World of Warcraft are surprisingly similar. Racking up professional skill endorsements, becoming the ‘mayor’ of your neighborhood bar, hitting 10,000 steps a day, maintaining a Snapchat streak, or accumulating valuable in-game items in Stardew Valley are all variants of the same thing. The video game achievements are often even more valuable than the others. […]

==[A] global hive mind made up of people in their parents’ basements, gathering and regurgitating information like termites converting wood into their massive enigmatic mounds.==

Filterworld: Algorithm cleanse

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Filterworld: Algorithm cleanse →{.caps} Kyle Chayka is doing an “algorithm cleanse.” Nothing super new but a good short piece and reminder. “I loved email newsletters before, but in my algorithm cleanse, I really love them. They arrive consistently, present a self-contained batch of curated content, and offer a variety of flavors and voices, like mini-magazines. … Posting is an addiction, too, and while I certainly suffer from it, I think all that energy is now expressed in my more serious writing, which is probably a good thing.”

Asides

• ==Don’t forget the PRIMER22 conference this week on the theme EXPER:ENCES OF T:ME.== The even is part of the Design Futures Initiative, which has chapters all around the world. As I mentioned last week, I just started co-hosting the one in Montréal, with our first live event being held last Tuesday. Follow the LinkedIn page to keep up to date.
• 🤔 🐟 “Enriched seaweed” could ease the global food crisis. “A new hybrid aquaculture system that nourishes edible seaweed with the waste from fish, can dramatically boost seaweed growth by 25% a day, amp up its nutritional value, and make algae more attractive to the food industry, new research shows.”
• 🤔 🪸 🇦🇺 Scientists can now train coral to spawn on demand. “[R]esearchers in Australia have joined a select few labs around the world that have figured out how to trigger spawning on a human-made schedule. The breakthrough at Australia’s National Sea Simulator, or SeaSim, announced August 22, is a critical step in the push to grow coral on a massive scale to help save the country’s Great Barrier Reef as its ravaged by climate change.”
• ⚡️ 🛵 🇮🇳 🇨🇳 🇻🇳 Scooters and 3-wheelers are really what’s driving an EV revolution. “[T]he global fleet of electric two- and three-wheelers, which, as of last year, reached 274.7 million vehicles on the road, comprising 42% of all sales of these smaller vehicles.”
• ⚡️ 🚲 The E-Bike Is Pure Joy. Answering Ian Bogost’s take. “A recent essay in ‘The Atlantic’ ignores the many ways in which electric bicycles are helping cyclists commute, recreate, and enjoy themselves”
• ☀️ ⚡️ Solar Industry Supply Chain That Will Beat Climate Change Is Already Being Built. “The solar boom of the past two decades has left the world with a cumulative 971GW of panels. The polysilicon sector is now betting on hitting something like that level of installations every year.”
• 🤩 🔭 I had no ideas this had existed! Aerial telescope. “[A] type of very long focal length refracting telescope, built in the second half of the 17th century, that did not use a tube.[1] Instead, the objective was mounted on a pole, tree, tower, building or other structure on a swivel ball-joint. The observer stood on the ground and held the eyepiece, which was connected to the objective by a string or connecting rod.” (Via The Prepared.)

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