Ellen Pearlman, PhD
2022, HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence
When it comes to European policymaking, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission plays an important role. It provides EU policy makers with robust data, scientifically sound evidence and research results, allowing EU policies toachieve the impact that they have been designed for. Better informed policies are keyto ensure that Europe becomes a better place - for humans, for animals, for the environment, for the entire complex ecosystem that defines our lives.Clearly, within the many challenges this entails, understanding how scientific discoveries, that so far we have only seen in science fiction movies, can shape our present and our future, is one of the most difficult tasks. In the recent times, ArtificialIntelligence and the digital revolution that leads our societies to a complete digitaltransformation are good examples. The digital revolution, in parallel with the green one, are the two sides of the so called twin transitions, that has the main goal of making our societies more sustainable, resilient, open, transparent and prosperous. Understanding the implications the digital transformation in general, and Artificial Intelligence in particular, have for our societies and democracies is a task of tall order. Therefore the main reason for the JRC to initiate fast track research and to actively contribute to the agenda setting of the current Commission, is to support shaping one of its main priorities: A Europe fit for the digital age. The JRC’s Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) spearheaded research on the impact of machine intelligence on human behaviour and investigated the benefits of the digital transformation for the governance of human societies. This complemented already ongoing research in the fields of social and economic impact of digital transformation.
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Why We Can't Know Anything about a Truly Posthuman Future
Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
2022
Simon, Z. B. (2022). Why We Can’t Know Anything about a Truly Posthuman Future. In Freddy Paul Grunert et al. (eds.), HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence. European Commission, 179-183.
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The Human Culture and the diaspora of Life
Pier Luigi Capucci
Freddy Paul Grunert, Max Craglia, Emilia Gómez, Jutta Thielen-del Pozo (eds.), HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence, Ravenna, Noema, 2022
Humanity has always been imagining, representing and creating life forms, the thrust for creating life-like entities has been pervading the whole human history. In the symbolic realm from antiquity until the contemporary narratives gods and heroes are present in religions and mythologies, legendary creatures populate the imaginary of all human cultures, through stories, representations, sagas, fictional worlds and legends. Unicorns, dragons, centaurs, chimeras, angels and devils, cyclopes, minotaurs, magicians, sirens, ogres, fairies, witches, elves, goblins, harpies, trolls…, and also monsters, heroes and common people, populate movies, comics, TV series and video games. The symbolic realm is a wonderful “Second Life”, a territory of pulsing imaginary life forms. In parallel, in the physical world, at least since the Neolithic, humanity has been creating new organic life forms by selecting and hybridising animal and vegetal species, giving birth to varieties that would have never evolved outside the human culture. In the organic realm the ability to operate with the matter of the living through bio-based sciences and technologies has lead to the creation of deeply modified and even totally new organisms. In the inorganic realm humanity has made increasingly powerful and autonomous artefacts, devices and machines that present behaviours similar to the living. Today Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Synthetic Biology, Genetic Engineering, Biotechnology, De-Extinction are expanding the boundaries of life and evolution. We are witnessing the extension of life to a complex scenery with organic, inorganic and mixed living forms. A “Third Life” originating from the human culture that expands Nature from within its own domain. “Third Life” being the “First Life” the biological life and the “Second Life” the life in the symbolic dimension.
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"The Performative Interface - Making Visible a Reality Beyond Appearance" by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss. In HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence. 2022
Monika Fleischmann
HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence (ed) Freddy Paul Grunert, 2022
"The Performative Interface - Making Visible a Reality Beyond Appearance" by Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss. This article explores the transformative potential of digital technology and its interface with human perception and interaction. Reflecting on the evolution of media art since the early 1990s, the authors highlight missed opportunities for social empowerment with the rise of centralized platforms and corporate control. They confront pressing global crises such as social inequality, climate change, and mass migration, urging a reevaluation of societal values and a shift toward sustainable living. Amid the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), the essayists emphasize the importance of critical engagement and public discourse, and advocate media art as a means of exposing and revealing hidden truths. They introduce the concept of the "performative interface," which goes beyond traditional notions of interactivity to engage users in a cognitive and sensory encounter that invites participation in the unknown. Using examples such as their groundbreaking Semantic Map, Fleischmann and Strauss demonstrate the potential of the performative interface to reveal hidden realities and encourage collaborative thinking. They envision a future where natural and artificial intelligence coexist, creating augmented thinking spaces that empower humans to explore new meanings and create knowledge. See the article on page 91 in "Humanities and Artificial Intelligence" by Freddy Paul Grunert. The biography of Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss highlights their pioneering work in digital media and their commitment to empowering individuals through interactive art experiences.
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Understanding the Present as Cosmo-technological Transformation: Towards A General Ecology of Thought and Technodiversity
Michael Baker
Conference Presentation Comparative & International Education Society 2021
We cannot adequately understand the present without adequately understanding the world making and destroying powers of modern technology, overlooked in modern Western philosophy (Heidegger, 1977a; Hui, 2016). Suggested in the titles of two recent books – The Sixth Extinction (Kolbert, 2014) and The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2017), the material and ideological conditions of existence are changing, rapidly and disruptively (Hamilton, 2017; Nancy & Barrau, 2014). Most of us do not really understand all that is happening now, and how all this is shaping the ways our worlds are being reordered, i.e., social media, algorithms, cybernetics, the anthropocene (Hamilton,2017; Haraway, 2015; Steigler, 2018; Stengers, 2015). The unsettling technological advancements and the disordering of worlds since at least the "great acceleration" in the 1950s are part of an historical conjuncture of forces and events that need to be explained together (Grossberg, 2016; McNeill & Engelke, 2014). We live in a planetary technological condition today, yet technology continues to be understood as instruments for accomplishing rational human purposes (Ellul, 1964). In the early 1950s, Martin Heidegger argued that the emergence of cybernetics meant the “end of philosophy” and the beginning of a planetary domestication based on Western techno-scientific thought (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 377). Since the 1950s, the process of cybernetization has concretized in world-wide systems of technological mediation that operate within sensory and intelligent environments in the form of ubiquitous computing and pervasive media (Horl, 2013a). Reflected in the diverse debates on humanism and posthumanism, interrelated with the ontological turn in the sciences and humanities, we are living through a crisis/transformation in the humanist, anthropocentric ways we learned to understand ourselves and the world (Blaser,2010; Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018; Braidotti, 2019; Escobar, 2017; Ferrando, 2019, de Castro, 2014; Mignolo, 2011). The modern humanist paradigm of technics as an extension of instrumental reason has been succeeded by a wide variety of post-humanist philosophies of the relations between nature and technics, evolving around the present form of “technoecological rationality” (Hayles, 1999; Horl, 2018a; Hui, 2019a). The distinctions between artificial and natural, inorganic and organic, no longer hold as cybernetic machines acquire a kind of organicity (Hui, 2019; Pierce, 2013). The technique/nature opposition, constitutive of Enlightenment thought, has given way to a generalized techno-nature, exemplified in global warming and biotechnology (Lindberg, 2018, p. 95). Nature and technology and human beings are not separate entities, but ontologically intertwined in the production of particular modes of existence. We seem to be living in a homeless, disorienting technologically mediated world order that is changing who we are and how we live, evident in the COVID-19 pandemic -- an unchecked environmental consequence of modern urban development. The planetarization of media technology are subjugating populations in ways that are both environmental and technological -- techno-ecological. This sense of existence as environmentally mediated contributes to the proliferation of a generalized semantics of ecology and renewed analysis of the relations between individuals and their milieus (Simondon, 2012). The technoecological condition is the result of the technocapitalist form of power (Horl, 2013a, 2015; Peters, 2017). The Social Credit System in China for example, portends a future of political subjugation of populations within totalizing cyber-capitalist systems of surveillance. The nature of existence and our understanding of existence have changed, yet education largely continues to reproduce the modern cosmology (Olsen & Gershmam, 1989) The ontological turn represents the proliferation of post-disciplinary thinking reconceptualizing the nature of existence with post-dualist assumptions outside the individual subject-object-world metaphysics of modernity. There are many contradictory currents comprising this turn, but all of them can be divided between those oriented towards expanding powers of control (i.e., eco-modernism, transhumanism, technological singularity), and those recognizing the universal limits and geopolitics of conceptions and knowledges of reality (Asafy-Adjaye, 2015; Bostrom, 2008; Kurzweil, 2005; Pellizzoni, 2015; Reiter, 2018; Santos, 2018; Savransky, 2017). Along with post-dualist technosciences for mastering a singular, universal world reality, a post-dualist ontological pluralism has emerged in the modern knowledge disciplines, particularly in philosophical anthropology, post-phenomenology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 1991; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; de Castro, 2014). As the decolonial critique has argued, modernity is a political-ontological imposition of a singular world ontology, upon which modern techno-industrial-colonial worlds have been built (Escobar, 2017; Maldonado-Torres, 2002; Mignolo, 2012). Drawing on this pluriversal ontological turn, I adopt the concept of ontological politics to refer to how different ways of knowing and being participate in the cosmo-politics of world formations (Blaser, 2008; Escobar, 2017; Savransky, 2014; Skafish, 2020; Pellizzoni, 2015). I propose we consider the present as a contradictory and uncertain crisis and transformation of the modern cosmology and ask how education might be redesigned to critically address the technoecological conditions of existence (Hamilton, 2020). I am interpreting the end and transformation of the modern worldview and project from new materialist philosophies of technics and media ecologies (Guattari, 2000; Horl, 2013a; Hui, 2019a). From the philosophy of technology and media, I describe both Erich Horl and Yuk Hui’s interpretations of the technoecological conditions of the present (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2019a). I focus on Horl and Hui’s proposals for critically understanding, assessing, and intervening in the present conditions of existence -- “general ecology of thought” and “cosmotechnics” (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016b). In the present technoecological condition, general ecology names a new field for critical analysis while cosmotechnics names a renewed relation between technics and humans and technics and nature (Horl, 2017a; Hui, 2016a). Cosmotechnics unifies the moral order and the cosmic order through technical activities (Dunker, 2020). There are varied twentieth century sources underlying this recent ontological turn in the philosophy of technology and media, including philosophical cosmology, connecting cosmology with metaphysics (An, 2019; Deleuze, 1968; Jonas, 1966; Simondon, 2016; Spengler, 1932; Whitehead, 1929). I see all this thought first, as ways of renewing critical theory for the present technoecological condition and second, as pedagogical contributions to a critical post-human humanities (Braidotti, 2016; The Institute of Speculative & Critical Inquiry). I conclude by asking how a general ecology of thought might prepare education for the task of thinking beyond neo-cybernetic systems of control (Beniger, 1989)?
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Intelligence, from Natural Origins to Artificial Frontiers - Human Intelligence vs. Artificial Intelligence
Nicolae Sfetcu
MultiMedia Publishing, 2024
The parallel history of the evolution of human intelligence and artificial intelligence is a fascinating journey, highlighting the distinct but interconnected paths of biological evolution and technological innovation. This history can be seen as a series of interconnected developments, each advance in human intelligence paving the way for the next leap in artificial intelligence. Human intelligence and artificial intelligence have long been intertwined, evolving in parallel trajectories throughout history. As humans have sought to understand and reproduce intelligence, AI has emerged as a field dedicated to creating systems capable of tasks that traditionally require human intellect. This book examines the evolutionary roots of intelligence, explores the emergence of artificial intelligence, examines the parallel history of human intelligence and artificial intelligence, tracing their development, interactions, and profound impact they have had on each other, and envisions future landscapes where intelligence converges human and artificial. Let's explore this history, comparing key milestones and developments in both realms.
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The Western Mathematic and the Ontological Turn: Ethnomathematics and Cosmotechnics for the Pluriverse
Michael Baker
Indigenous Knowledge and Ethnomathematics, 2022
This chapter calls for critical reflection on the onto-political relations between mathematics, technics, and cultures in the context of the ecological and technological crises of modern Western civilization. The relations between a culture's mathematic, technical practices, and metaphysical worldview are intertwined elements within different civilizational complexes, comprising the geo-cosmo-politics of the modern world order. Reflected in the posthuman and post-anthropocentric turns in the sciences and humanities, a variety of alternative ontologies of existence are emerging. As an intellectual field, the posthuman ontological turn is a bifurcated shift in the fundamental concepts and assumptions underlying the modern knowledge disciplines. The ontological turn has unsettled Western metaphysical concepts of nature and culture, calling the relations between mathematics and nature into question within an emerging historical problematic identified as the technoecological condition. I am exploring ways of overcoming the singular world ontology of modernity with a pluriversal ontological politics of knowledge and education. Ontological diversity is dependent upon technodiversity, while technodiversity is dependent upon renewed cosmological relations between technics and cultures. Mathematical knowledge practices are centrally about intervening in environments as well as providing metaphysical grounds for establishing truth. The technoecological condition involves the replacement of subject centered sense making with the environmentalization of sense, i.e., smart cities, ubiquitous computing and global media. Grounded in the mathematic of Western modernity, the process of cybernetization has concretized in world-wide systems of technological mediation that operate within sensory and intelligent environments. Biodiversity and technodiversity are being lost in an expanding mono-cultural technological civilizational complex. Underlying the production and consumption of cybernetic technologies are particular kinds of mathematics (i.e., symbolic, experimental, technological, computational), participating in multiple fields of knowledge, embedded in cultural-historical events, processes, concepts and presuppositions about the world. This modern metaphysical paradigm shift involves a change in the ontological relations between mathematics and technology, reflected in the hybrid reformations of computational mathematics and STEM education, i.e., biotechnology, artificial intelligence. An historical ontology of cultures and mathematics brings matter and meaning together, focusing on the material/ideological relations between mathematics, technics, cultures, and environments. Cosmotechnics is proposed to the knowledge disciplines to balance the cosmological relations between cultures, technics, and natures. We can learn to live within the limits of the earth system. From this recognition of the cosmo-ontological relations between the modern Western mathematic and modern technology, ethnomathematics contributes to a project of producing technodiversity in a world propelled towards technological singularity. A multiple ontologies perspective, associated with the ontological turns in anthropology, sociology, geography, decoloniality, and philosophy of technology and media, contributes towards a pluriversal project of overcoming technological modernity that is neither fascist, nationalist, nor technocapitalist.
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The Technologized Creation The Mythological Foundation of Posthumanism in EX MACHINA
Felix Woitkowski
Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung, 2020
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Probability and Agency: Introduction
Natasha Lushetich
Parallax, 2023
Contemporary technologies and media practices have irrevocably shifted the ways in which agency is exerted in social contexts. On the one hand, we are faced with the loss of faith in human intuitive knowledge, caused largely by dataism and its neoplatonic tendencies. On the other hand, there is the impasse of overdetermination and indeterminacy. Consider, for instance, the 2017 Grenfell disaster. For years, the inhabitants of the Grenfell tower in Londonwhere a fire broke out in June 2017 killing 74 peoplewere reporting electricity oscillations and frequent explosions of household appliances. They saw this as a clear sign that larger-scale incidents were not only possible but highly probable. However, their reports were ignored as the data about the tower contradicted these 'impressions', and the Council chose to trust the data. Data science's derivation of actionable conclusions from opaque algorithmic processes has neoplatonic tendencies in that it treats these processes as revelatory of a hidden mathematical order that is superior to human knowledge and experience.
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The Social Reconfiguration of Artificial Intelligence: Utility and Feasibility
James Steinhoff
AI for Everyone? Critical Perspectives, 2021
This paper argues that any discussion of “AI for everyone” needs to be situated within the context of the highly oligopolistic AI Industry. I argue that one should distinguish between the desirability of AI for everyone and the feasibility of AI for everyone. While several Marxian thinkers have argued for the social desirability of AI, the feasibility of an AI for everyone has not been explored. This paper explores this topic by drawing on the notion of “reconfiguration” elaborated first by Jasper Bernes in a critical assessment of logistics infrastructure. I assess whether AI might be “seized” by non-capital, and how, if wrested from capital, it might be operated. I show how contemporary AI differs from the industrial means of production studied by Marx. I conclude that today, a reconfiguration of AI towards social ends seems difficult at best.
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Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures
Petar Jandrić
Postdigital Science and Education, 2020
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