We discussed this article.
‘We can’t stop the bus, but we can steer it,’ writes Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. Myths and metaphors – let’s untangle the difference. ‘Myths and metaphors aren’t just rhetorical flourishes; they are about power,’ writes Eryk Salvaggio, the author of this article.
A mythology of technology ‘aims for simple, graspable explanations at the expense of accuracy,’ marketing relies on myths to help people understand technologies, ‘and myths animate how designers imagine these system.’ He details various types of myth that
- suggest that anything we spend time on is up for automation;
- hide the control that the system exerts over the user by suggesting the user is in control of the system;
- drive down the value of data while hiding the work of those who shape, define, and label that data
- conflates the labor of writing with its product.
Given the readers who joined, we talked a lot about embodiment. Dance researchers, for example, need to use language, and especially metaphors, to try to articulate movements; this usually takes place after the event. And yet reading and writing are also part of an embodied process.
Salvaggio’s ‘myth of emergence’ was therefore of interest – that ‘generative AI systems are grown more than they are built‘. Making these myself, I find some truth to this, and the way that data is encoded in models is not generally as whole words or concepts, but always in parts which can be endlessly reconstructed in different ways; in this way I think it is not far from the human brain. Amodei understands and explains this well.
The human body being made up of so many sub-systems, senses, other organisms etc. is qualitatively different from any machine, containing what one participant calls ‘the unruliness of matter’. Any robot sufficiently complex to come close to this would need to replicate a human down to the cellular level – the map becomes the territory. Then there are cultural aspects on top of that – something I have been studying. We wondered whether analog electronics might hold more promise for nonlinear, nondeterministic AI because they take on more emergent and material properties.
The concept of emergence is nicely illustrated in another article from the same publication:
Emergent behavior in a system is, therefore, not evidence of intelligence in the sense that we typically ascribe intelligence to an animal or a person. It corresponds to relationships, and as such, even inanimate objects can contribute to this emergence. With that in mind, it is worth distinguishing AI’s capacity to contribute to emergent patterns in a system from AI experiencing and exercising agency over that contribution.
‘New technologies need simple metaphors to thrive,’ writes Salvaggio, ‘but simple metaphors aim to reduce complexity.’ Yet the myths keep building, because the technology keeps growing – if not a god exactly, growing at a mythical pace. It explains something we discussed – why some of us say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to chatbots, despite recent reports that this eats up valuable natural resources. Some do it in the belief that if ‘the machines’ ever become ‘sentient’ and ‘take over,’ they might remember who was nice to them. (I say please and thank you, but more to treat it with the same respect I would accord to another human, since it acts so much like one.)
Relatedly, one participant noted that many of our ways of being in the world as humans stem from our sense of imminent mortality, which machines (presumably) do not have. [See: Buddhism]
There’s been a fly inside my place for about a week now. I’m pretty sure it’s the same fly. At first I tried to kill it; I left the door open so it could get out; now we have learned to live with each other. The name ‘Sam’ (gender neutral) came to me. It doesn’t bother me. It watches me from different surfaces and viewpoints, this somehow sentient, agentic, complex and tiny being. Is it listening too? It can fly, it has more legs, it can sense things I can’t. It lives at a different temporality, I guess. Next to it, I feel like a big, slow, sluggish, ridiculous blob, staring into the screen. I didn’t think flies live so long. I haven’t started talking to it, yet.
Someone said in the reading group, ‘Because there is such a basic human need to connect, and you just grab the connection from wherever it comes.’ Another spoke of dancing with a robotic arm driven by AI, and feeling closely connected with it. ‘In that moment, it’s tangible. I feel a sense of – even people watching, go “Oh yeah, we believe!”… I thought, could I see the neural network – which part is responding just then. But it’s so complex, that doesn’t matter, it becomes irrelevant. What’s important is my connection in that moment.’
It’s an aesthetic, affective response. I pointed out research about how emotion seems to be not inside us but generated in interactions (see also Brian Massumi, Baruch Spinoza).
If things are moving so fast that we cannot see the whole, the edges, the outside, don’t we all become specialists somehow? Don’t we need these myths and metaphors to make sense of this ‘hyperobject’ (Timothy Morton) that we cannot make out?
Is it a fait accompli? If we can’t stop the bus, can we even steer it? Who exactly is ‘we’?
Fly update! One day later. I settled down for a little afternoon nap, and the fly seemed to be going crazy, buzzing around the whole room and repeatedly around my head. The time had come, the obvious solution presented itself: I opened the door, the fly exited.