In late spring this year, the Barbican Centre in London will explore the promise and perils of artificial intelligence in a festival of films, workshops, concerts, talks and exhibitions. Even before the show opens, however, I have a bone to pick: what on earth induced the organisers to call their show AI: More than human?
More than human? What are we听being sold here? What are we being asked to assume, about the technology and about ourselves?
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Language is at the heart of the听problem. In his 2007 book, , computer scientist Marvin Minsky deplored (although even he couldn鈥檛 altogether avoid) the use of 鈥渟uitcase words鈥�: his phrase for words conveying specialist technical detail through simple metaphors. Think what we are doing when we say metal alloys 鈥渞emember鈥� their shape, or that a search engine offers 鈥渋ntelligent鈥� answers to a query.
High price of communicating
Without metaphors and the human tendency to personify, we would never be able to converse, let alone explore technical subjects, but the price we pay for communication is a credulity when it comes to modelling how the world actually works. No wonder we are outraged when AI doesn鈥檛 behave intelligently. But it isn鈥檛 the program playing us false, rather the name we gave it.
Then there is the problem outlined by Benjamin Bratton, director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego, and author of cyber bible . Speaking at Dubai鈥檚 Belief in AI听symposium last year, he said听we use suitcase words from听religion when we talk about听AI, because we simply don鈥檛听know what AI is yet.
For how long, he asked, should we go along with the prevailing hype and indulge the idea that artificial intelligence resembles (never mind surpasses) human intelligence? Might this warp or spoil a promising technology?
The Dubai symposium, organised by Kenric McDowell and Ben Vickers, interrogated these questions well. McDowell leads the Artists and Machine Intelligence programme at Google听Research, while Vickers has overseen experiments in听neural-network art at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Conversations, talks and screenings explored what they called a 鈥渕onumental shift in how societies construct the everyday鈥�, as we increasingly hand over our decision-making to non-humans.
Exclusion by maths
Some of this territory is familiar. Ramon听Amaro, a design听engineer at Goldsmith, University of London, drew the obvious moral from the story of researcher Joy Buolamwini, whose facial-recognition art project refused to recognise her because of her black skin.
The听point is not simple racism. The truth is even more disturbing: machines are nowhere near clever enough to handle the huge spread of normal distribution on which virtually all human characteristics and behaviours lie. The tendency to exclude is embedded in the mathematics of these machines, and no patching can fix it.
Yuk Hui, a philosopher who studied computer engineering and philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, broadened the lesson. Rational, disinterested thinking machines are simply impossible to build. The problem is not technical but formal, because thinking always has a purpose: without a goal, it is too expensive a process to arise spontaneously.
The more machines emulate real brains, argued Hui, the more they will听evolve 鈥撎齠rom autonomic response to brute urge to emotion. The implication is clear. When we give these recursive neural networks access to the internet, we are setting wild animals loose.
Turneresque dishcloth
Although the speakers were well-informed, Belief in AI was听never intended to be a technical conference, and so ran听the risk of all such speculative endeavours听鈥撎齞rowning in hyperbole. Artists using neural networks in their practice are painfully aware of this. One artist absent from the conference, but cited by several speakers, was Turkish-born Memo Akten, based at Somerset House in London.
His neural networks make predictions on live webcam input, using previously seen images to make sense of new ones. In one experiment, a scene including a dishcloth is converted into a Turneresque animation by a recursive neural network trained on seascapes. The temptation to say this network is 鈥渋nterpreting鈥� the view,听and 鈥渃reating鈥� art from it, is听well nigh irresistible. It drives Akten crazy. Earlier this year in a听public forum he threatened to听strangle a kitten whenever anyone in the audience personified AI, by talking about听鈥渢he AI鈥�, for instance.
It was left to novelist Rana Dasgupta to really put the frighteners on us as he coolly unpicked the state of automated late capitalism. Today, capital and rental income are the true indices of political participation, just as they were before the industrial revolution. Wage rises? Improved working conditions? Aspiration? All so last year. Automation has听 made their obliteration possible, by reducing to virtually nothing the costs of manufacture.
A cruel world machine
Dasgupta鈥檚 vision of lives spent听in subjection to a World Machine听鈥� fertile, terrifying, inhuman, unethical, and not in the least interested in us听鈥� was also a suitcase of sorts, too, containing a lot of hype, and no small amount of theology. It was also impossible to dismiss.
Cultural institutions dabbling in the AI pond should note the obvious moral. When we design something we decide to call an artificial intelligence, we commit ourselves to a linguistic path we shouldn鈥檛 pursue. To put it more simply: we must be careful what we wish for.
, Barbican Centre, London, 16 May to 26 August;
, a symposium hosted at Dubai Design Week in conjunction with Global Grad Show, Dubai
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