Read more "” All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture” : Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence"“Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment – this philosophy of technology exactly – that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.
I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” – as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean – since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.
The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.
I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts – especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces – with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.
Uncategorized
Another strategy for coping with the failure of artificial intelligence on its conventional terms has assumed a higher profile among its champions lately, drawing support for the real plausibility of one science-fictional conceit – construction of artificial intelligence – by appealing to another science-fictional conceit, contact with alien intelligence. This rhetorical gambit has often been […]
Read moreRead moreInstead of throwing things away in orbit (Skylab, Salyuts, Mir) we can now build upon these assets and move them around like Lego bricks to form new things as we need them – and then do this again and again. When the government is done with their hardware, it can be used by someone else – just like old military bases can become movie studios and shopping malls. The more orbital capacity that is available, the more customers it can collectively and individually serve. The more valuable these on-orbit assets become for government and non-government uses, the more everyone will want to safeguard that growing capacity (and isolate it from terrestrial squabbles) as has been the case with ISS recently.
Brave space robots literally make me misty. And it’s not just because they serve as a proxy for the East African Plains Apes millions of miles away, at their controls. In fact, I think most of the time we forget that our speciesmates are back there (back here!) on Earth, fiddling with joysticks and flipping toggles. Or tapping away on keyboards and puzzling over ambiguous shadows in photographs.
We say, “Curiosity discovered–” after all. We even construct gender for her and her and her sister Martian rovers–they’re female, a pack of brave, adventurous Girl Scouts out there earning merit badges and drilling in to rocks.
I may have shed a tiny tear when I stayed up way, way too late to ‘watch’ her land. I was certainly rooting for her with as much ferocity as I’ve ever rooted for a Bruce Willis character, and considerably more than I could muster for WALL-E. (That’ll be my unpopular confession for this column.)
It’s interesting to me that we can individually haul up this emotional connection, this strength of empathy, for a machine that–objectively speaking–is just a machine. Not a living creature with feelings and agency; nothing with an object position of its own. More than that, that that empathy is easy for us.
Collectively, we seem to have a hard time summoning that understanding, that complex imagining of the other, for beings who are far more similar to us than these brave space toasters. Who are separated only by a gene controlling pigmentation, or a religious or political belief structure. Possibly it’s because brave little robots are so alien. We don’t come with any installed stereotypes or unexamined prejudices, and they’re not exactly competition. Maybe it’s because robots don’t have political opinions, or a convoluted and shared history of competition and oppression.
In any case, maybe it’s a good sign.
If we can learn to care about robots, maybe we can learn to care about less alien but more strange creatures, such as each other.
Space Robot Sad Trombone – Charlie’s Diary guest post by Elizabeth Bear
Read more
The 2022 probe, which is needed to upgrade NASA’s aging Mars telecommunications network, also will have a “robust” science component, Watzin said…
Watzin offered no further details about the planned Mars 2022 probe, which in some ways is at least conceptually similar to the canceled Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. That mission, scrapped in 2005 to clear room in NASA’s budget for other missions, would have launched in 2009.
Currently, NASA leans heavily on the 13-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to relay data collected by the landers and rovers on Mars to Earth. There is real concern that the aging spacecraft might fail, Fuk Li, Director of the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told MEPAG after Watzin spoke.
One of Odyssey’s four reaction wheels — used to keep the spacecraft properly oriented — failed in 2012, and ever since, the craft has made do with three. The Mars Atmospheric Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, orbiter that arrived in martian orbit in September to study the planet’s upper atmosphere could serve as a backup communications relay in a pinch, but NASA would prefer not to take that route.
“We never wanted to use MAVEN for relay operations unless there was a sudden emergency,” Li said. However, “we [will] probably have to invoke the capability that MAVEN has” if older Mars satellites such as Odyssey fail.
NASA Eyes New Mars Orbiter for 2022 – SpaceNews.com or the status of our telecommunications infrastructure on Mars
Read more
Read morePeople walking around when talking on their mobile phone is a common behavior.
Referred to as âCell Tranceâ in the Urban Dictionnary2, this way of moving
back and forth is often seen in public venues such as hallways, sidewalks, train
platforms, bus stops or shopping malls. To onlookers, the erratic perambulation
looks aimless, as if the caller is detached from his surroundings, absorbed in a
private sonic universe.From Curious Rituals, a book about “gestural interaction in the digital everyday”, by Nicolas Nova, Katherine Miyake, Waton Chiu and Nancy Kwon.
via Alexis Madrigal and Jesper Balslev
Read moreAn entity like Siri, for instance, is not aspiring to become more human; Siri would want to be many times more efficient than that. Siri does not have one conversation like the conversation we are having here. Siri has hundreds of thousands of conversations at once. It wants to look through more databases faster; it does not want to read its way through a book, quietly pondering, like Alan Turing might have done.
You do not want Siri to be more like Alan Turing, you want Siri to be more like Apple Inc. You want Siri to do everything that Apple can do: Geophysically locate things, run big databases, find apps for you, look for movie locations. Alan Turing does not know every movie in California! You are getting in the way when you say, “Siri, why can’t you be more like a Mid-20th century gay mathematician? So you can pass the Turing Test.” That would be metaphysically pleasing; it would have made Turing’s point. Me in one room, Siri in the other room, and we seem exactly the same; therefore, cognition equals computation. Cognition does not equal computation. You do not even want cognition to equal computation. You are getting in the way of making computation do things that are of genuine interest.
Read moreIt wasn’t meant to end like this, Yuri Shwedoff
Read moreAbout 12,000 years ago, humans began farming, living in denser settlements and burying their dead, so skeletons younger than that are plentiful, said Stanley Ambrose, an African archaeologist and paleoanthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the study.
But relatively little is known about the people who came before them. Only a handful of human burials around the world date from about 12,000 to 30,000 years ago, Ambrose said.
To learn more about this lost period of human history, Tryon and his colleagues took a second look at specimens that were sitting in the collections of the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi. The artifacts were unearthed in the 1970s at rock shelters at Lukenya Hill, a granite promontory that overlooks the savanna in Kenya.
Among the finds was the top portion of an ancient skull. The team took several measurements of the skull, then compared it with skulls from Neanderthals, several other fossil human skulls from the same time and other periods, as well as those of modern-day humans.
Though the skull clearly belonged to a Homo sapien who was anatomically modern, its dimensions were markedly different from those of both the European skull and the African skulls from the same time. In addition, the skull was thickened, either from damage, nutritional stress or a highly active childhood. (There is not enough evidence to say the fossil represents a subspecies of Homo sapien, Tryon said.)
By measuring the ratio of radioactive isotopes of carbon (or carbon atoms with different numbers of neutrons), the team concluded that the skull was about 22,000 years old. That means the ancient human would have lived during the height of the last ice age.
Modern-day Africans have greater genetic diversity than other populations. But the new findings suggest that during this early period of human history, Africa may have supported even greater human diversity, with small, offshoot lineages that no longer exist today, Tryon said.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 