Browsing by Subject "cybernetics"

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was founded on the conviction that in order to make computers more advanced, it was necessary to build them to be more human. Adopting the human form as the blueprint for computer systems allowed AI researchers to imagine and construct computer systems capable of feats otherwise unimaginable for machines. As the institutions and professional boundaries of the field have evolved over the past 70 years, they have at times obscured the figure of the human at the heart of AI work. However, in moments of heightened optimism, when researchers permit themselves to speculate on the fantastic futures AI technologies will one day enable, it is inevitably to this figure that the field returns, forever striving to resolve that originary question of just what is the nature of this human intelligence the field has so long pursued?

In this dissertation, I trace the emergence of the figure of the human at the center of AI work. I argue that the human at the center of the imaginary of AI is rooted in a deeper impulse---that of envisioning not machines that think, but machines that speak. It is language that most fundamentally defines the original ambition of AI work and the inability to conceptualize language apart from the human that draws the field inevitably back to this figure. With language properly at the center of its project, AI becomes a study not of the physical world but of the narrative universe, not of the biological human being but of literary character, not of machinic intelligence but of machinic personhood.

Drawing on the history of AI's entanglements with language, I argue for a reconceptualization of the project of AI around a vision of language not as an encoding of solitary thought but as a collection of shifting social practices that allow human and non-human intelligences to navigate their shared worlds despite their irreducibly alien cognitive realities. Such a reorientation, I contend, makes room for a broader vision of AI work that joins critical and technical practices in the shared project of grappling with the question of what it means to be human.

The term “unknown” no longer merely refers to a subjective judgment indicating a stable and conceivable fact or object “in the world.” Nor does it only describe a mathematical or scientific variable that can be calculated and predicted in relation to the consistent properties or timeless truths about reality. This dissertation investigates the multiple and contested meanings of the term in ecology, security, and computational design which taken together, are suggestive of an ontological and epistemological transformation in conceiving of the relation between the environment and technology already initiated with mid-20th century cybernetic and information theories. At the heart of this reconfiguration: “life itself” is mobilized as a post-human form of computational knowledge that can be stretched to embrace indeterminacy and the unknown, fueled by a planetary nomos. As with 21st century media like accelerated computing and artificial intelligence, the environment is no longer merely modified with technologies, but is increasingly constituted by future-oriented forms of algorithmic mediation that are explored here in the larger scope of the material and environmental impacts of technology.

Instead of following the work of a specific thinker, the project undertakes an interdisciplinary reevaluation of Cold War cybernetic ontologies in the literary post-humanities, new media art and design, affect theory, and media ecology, tracing how the passage of cybernetic metaphors into the global cultural imaginary is symptomatic of an ecological reconfiguration in the way technology is accumulated as power, knowledge, and capital. Specifically, it describes how the becoming environmental of computation also entails the remediation of a history of colonial extraction and subjugation in more reticular and algorithmic forms like neural networks and intelligent design, proffering mutations as technics that redeploy the Enlightenment political and metaphysical project of the Anthropos as relational ontologies and vitalist ecological politics. The project reevaluates the rejection of the anthropos in totalizing theoretical ecologism, given the resonances of the discourse with both neoliberal political ecology and the American and European far Right where the production of life is used legitimate techno-cybernetic extraction and violence.

Against the dominant themes of new materialist media theory and affect theory, the project develops a critique of media ecology. It draws on feminist materialist and postcolonial understandings of subjectivity and sovereignty to argue that the “unknown” is no longer a technological problem to be overcome, but rather, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon that operates at the level of material affect and environmental sense-making. Using both theoretical inquiry and case studies drawn from new media art practices and digital culture, I draw two implications of this shift for political thought: first, it is necessary to address how changes in sociality and politics in the era of accelerated and planetary computing technologies relate to transformations to the subjective characteristics of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity beyond the individual body, population, or nation-state; second, such reconsiderations of subjectivity may help to politicize the role of contingency and unknowability in digital environments and in the speculation of technological futures.

The dissertation explores the cultural archive of the Soviet cybernetics, computer science, and popular science fiction to see how they all contributed to a distinct “trustful” image of the computer. As interdisciplinary research originating during the Second World War in the USA, cybernetics sought to understand human nature in terms of man-machine metaphors. Within the Western context, cybernetic metaphors dethroned the human from the center of the universe and blurred the distinction between natural and artificial (or technological). Although cybernetics failed to establish itself as an academic discipline in the USA, its influence has been profound and its aftereffects can still be registered today both in academic discussions on digital media and posthumanism and broader cultural mythologies regarding AI takeover and evil machines (be it the Terminator and The Matrix franchises or replicants from Blade Runner). In contrast, the USSR, while having enthusiastically adopted cybernetic ideas and metaphors, didn’t see technology as an existential threat but rather a tool of self-discovery and as a friend who invites for an ethical dialogue.

The dissertation draws upon Michel Foucault and media archaeology and reconstructs the cultural episteme of the computer which is characterized by the fundamentally mathematical understanding of digital technologies, where mathematics not only framed human-computer interaction but, in so doing, “defused” man-machine analogies which were at the origin of the figure of the cyborg in American culture.

The dissertation thus contributes to contemporary debates in comparative media studies. By drawing on the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, the dissertation argues that digital media inaugurate a new stage in the evolution of technology. If the development of industrial technology is conditioned by the potentialities of matter and physical world, digital technologies explore the potentialities of operative representations encapsulated in programming languages, computer abstractions, and interfaces. Since operative representations serve to communicate with both humans and machines, in the case of digital technologies, the cultural is embedded withing the technological. The entwinement of the cultural and the technological accounts for the differences not only in the public image of the computer but also in scientific research, like, for instance, in the case of the AI research used as a case study in the dissertation.