In this text the term “artificial intelligence” refers to anthropomorphic and biomorphic models of intelligence, whereas the term “machine intelligence” refers to a form of intelligence that does not resemble features of the living (including human feelings and “consciousness”). A more secular definition of machine intelligence will help, hopefully, to disclose posthuman and antinormative correlations in social data rather than to reinforce the individual and social norms of class, gender, and race.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 21. Quoted in Anselm Franke, Animism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, Il: Wolfram Media, 2002), 845.
Musk’s concerns about AI probably originate, by the way, from the unfair practices of Google, his largest corporate competitor. See Rich McCormick, “Elon Musk: There’s only one AI company that worries me,” The Verge, June 2, 2016 →.
See Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), chap. 1.
The German biologist Jakob von Uexküll described the relation between an animal’s nervous system (Innenwelt) and the outside world (Außenwelt) as a “functional circle" (Funktionskreis). Similar to the Funktionskreis, the feedback loop of cybernetic systems is conceived as a circulation of information and response to an external stimulus.
David Bates, “Unity, Plasticity, Catastrophe: Order and Pathology in the Cybernetic Era,” in Catastrophe: History and Theory of an Operative Concept, eds. Andreas Killen and Nitzan Lebovic (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014).
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), 30.
The model was inspired by McCulloch and Pitt’s model of neural networks: their work was not referred to, but Turing’s paper was not published either. See Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, vol. 5, no. 4 (1943).
Alan Turing, “Intelligent Machinery” (1948), in The Essential Turing, ed. Jack Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 421.
Alan Turing, “Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine,” (1947), in ibid., 394. See Andrew Hodges, “Alan Turing,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Zalta, Winter 2013 edition: “Once the possibility of mistakes is admitted, Gödel’s theorem becomes irrelevant. Mathematicians and computers alike apply computable processes to the problem of judging the correctness of assertions; both will therefore sometimes err, since seeing the truth is known not to be a computable operation, but there is no reason why the computer need do worse than the mathematician.”
Simondon had a profound influence on Gilles Deleuze, who dedicated to him one of his rare book reviews. See Gilles Deleuze, “Gilbert Simondon: L’Individu et sa genèse physicobiologique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, CLVI:1–3 (1966).
Gilbert Simondon, “Individuation in the Light of the Notions of Form and Information.” Quoted in Andrea Bardin, Epistemology and Political Philosophy in Gilbert Simondon (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 70.
Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2015). See also Charles Wolfe, “De-ontologizing the Brain: from the fictional self to the social brain,” CTHEORY, 2007 →.
Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986 (1934)).
David Weinbaum and Viktoras Veitas, “Open-Ended Intelligence: The Individuation of Intelligent Agents,” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2016: 1–26.
Ibid.
Pancomputationalism is also addressed by French philosopher Michel Serres. See Matteo Pasquinelli, “On Solar Databases and the Exogenesis of Light,” in “Supercommunity,” special issue, e-flux journal 65 (May 2015) →.
Thanks to Lorenzo Sandoval for pointing to this section of the documentary.
Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 1945: 520.
Ibid., 524.
Ibid., 527.
Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, 1948.
“Master algorithm” is an expression used in machine learning. See Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
The conference took place at New York University, March 21–22, 2016.
For an account of the British industrialist class’s cult of the steam engine, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso Books, 2016).
Esiod 2015, directed by Clemens von Wedemeyer, 39 min, Austria/Germany, 2016.
Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 1 (1994).