Hello. In ... 2 hours, at 3pm ET, we're going to get together and talk about Part II of The Eye of the Master:

• Chapter 6: "The Self-Organisation of the Cybernetic Mind"
• Chapter 7: "The Automation of Pattern Recognition"
• Chapter 8: "Hayek and the Epistemology of Connectionism"
• Chapter 9: "The Invention of the Perceptron"
• Conclusion: "The Automation of General Intelligence"

Reading about the history of the internet, I found myself thinking a little about what conditions it takes, or what conditions it has empirically taken, for organizers and activists to consent to take up a technology or tools that had previously been understood and dismissed as military interests or explicit military projects. I'm obviously not trying to challenge the uptake of the internet, I mean look at us here on the internet - nor (to be clear) am I suggesting that we consider that for any existing projects, like AI - although I've been talking to people organizing against data centers and AI projects in general, and the question of like... to what extent do we exploit the tools that are available to us in an effort to undermine a thing.

None of that is really part of the point of anything Pasquinelli was saying, but I guess I found myself dwelling in the history of ARPANET and the eventual emergence of the internet as we know it, and ... I'm assuming it was more controversial than everyone just cluelessly and blithely picking it up and running with it. I know Fred Turner has written about this social movement in the 60s and onwards in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, and it's on my list to go back and re-read ASAP. Anyway, neither here nor there.

More on topic... there are a few quotes from part II that I really want to surface and ask us to reflect on as possible starting points:

McCulloch once claimed that 'every robot suggests a mechanistic hypothesis concerning man'... this thesis may actually imply that every form of labour automation says something about the cognitive models of a given age. [page 154]

The paradigm of connectionist AI did not not win out over symbolic AI because the former is 'smarter' or better able to mimic brain structures, but rather because inductive and statistical algorithms are more efficient at capturing the logic of social cooperation than deductive ones. [page 155]

Machines can be perceived as 'thinking' because they mimic the theatre of the human. [page 232]

... in the same way in which fossil bones disclose the nature of ancient species in which they lived, similarly, technical artefacts reveal the form of the society that surrounds and runs them. [page 238]

to compare human and machine intelligence implies also a judgement about which human behavior or social group is more intelligent than another, which workers can be replaced and which cannot. [page 246]

the first step of technopolitics is not technological, but political. It is about emancipating and decolonising, when not abolishing as a whole, the organisation of labour and social relations on which complex technical systems, industrial robots, and social algorithms are based. [page 253]

I would really like to think about the logics upon which AI is predicated and think about what it would look like, and what would happen, to attack those logics. We've read and discussed this stuff in other books - Why We Fear AI by Blix & Glimmer; Resisting AI by McQuillan; Disabling Intelligences by Williams; Techno-Negative by Dekeyser come to mind most saliently for our book group - but we've also talked in passing about Health Communism by Adler-Bolton & Vierkant.

I'm also evidently drawn to the observations Pasquinelli makes about how the forms of AI that took hold and flourished didn't prevail because of any authentic merit - or not on the merits that we would've intuitively figured were the "selecting forces" of this project of AI; the selecting force was how efficiently one approach managed to replicate a certain logic compared to other approaches. That metric is what decided which camps "won" this controversy of "gestalt perception" that Pasquinelli writes about.

I was thinking yesterday about how

it's worth taking seriously the multi-pronged cultural project to anthropomorphize AI, legal project to establish precedents for legal rights for LLMs (or maybe more practically as corporations), and theological lobbying to elevate them to an ambiguous state on the level of souls

(tweet)

... and I'm realizing that there is something to tack on here as well - the debates about cognition and the perception of machines as "thinking" based on the theatre of the human that Pasquinelli writes about might similarly be part of a broader project that should be taken seriously (to be clear, not seriously in the sense that it's persuasive or compelling, but seriously as in a lot of our political enemies are coordinating, and it would be a mistake to be flippant about them, no matter how ridiculous and goofy their stated politics and ideologies are). In this way I'm also thinking back to The Nerd Reich by Durán, which we just finished (we can talk about that if people are interested in revisiting and if people have pressing thoughts to apply to this).

Last thought I really want to emphasize: what does it take to do technopolitics in this time? Pasquinelli argues that it needs to start with politics; I agree, obviously. I don't think AI is a technological project - I've candidly rejected that entire framework in some blog post stuff I've written elsewhere (uh here). I'd also like to chat about the lowercase-p political work people are doing in the struggle against... all this stuff we've been reading and talking about.

When you're ready to join at 3p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.