Toward the end of his life, Timothy Leary began discussing the possibility of the internet as electronic LSD. Chaos and Cyber Culture is an amazing and curious artifact of the early web. There you might learn how to become an amphibian, as Leary claimed to be. Without romanticizing his provocative positioning, there has long been…
Keep readingIn the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we might consider Nietzsche’s remark that the human “intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance.” Mythologically, the AI is a non-human version of the human intellect, but could it ever have…
Keep readingThe general advice I would give to my arts and humanities colleagues as they address AI is the cliché martial arts fight scene advice: Trust your training! From a broadly-conceived humanities critical theoretical approach, what is artificial intelligence? If we want to talk about artificial intelligence as a term invented at conference at Dartmouth in…
Keep readingThis is basically what you think it is. No intentional AI use. (I realize we’re soaking in it, but this is about experience.) This is something I am doing for myself. As part of my research approach, I engage with the media I am studying. In the 90s I learned HTML, then later other tools.…
Keep readingIn the 1990s, the “science wars” asked whether science was objective or culturally constructed. Today, AI ethics raises a different but related question: can ethical norms be operationalized as optimization targets and enforced through technical architecture? Alignment is not the same as ethical agency. Guardrails are not the same as deliberation. And product safety is…
Keep readingIn ebr: electronic book review, Anna Mills, Jon Ippolito, Maha Bali, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Annette Vee, and Marc Watkins have published a series titled The Transformers: Imagining the Future of the Teaching of Writing. My title borrows from theirs. They raise two important and related questions for writing instructors: Certainly there are many…
Keep reading
My academic career has roughly corresponded with the rise of the internet, and the developments of networked digital media have been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. I have investigated the role intelligent machines play in the ways we communicate, the communities we form, and our engagement with larger world.
My current research (book) project is tentatively titled Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My most recent open access publication is “Living on Digital Flatlands: Assemblies of Computer Vision.” Here’s the abstract.
This article explores computer vision not only in terms of its use with “intelligent” machines, such as autonomous vehicles, but also more broadly in terms of quotidian, digitally-mediated human vision, such as that experienced through smartphones. Drawing on assemblage theory and radical media archeology, I describe the technological processes that link together materially different spatiotemporal assemblages to produce a posthuman condition of computer vision typified by what Wolfgang Ernst terms the “epistemogenic momentum” of “techno-mathematical configurations.” Manuel DeLanda’s flat ontologies prove useful here for describing how assemblages operating in different space-times interact. I then turn to Deleuze and Guatarri’s techno-semiological stratum, specifically their discussion of the stratum’s spatiotemporal superlinearity, to articulate an emerging digital-calculative layer. I argue that understanding computer vision assemblages requires more than setting technical descriptions alongside cultural-ideological critique; it also requires an integrated analysis of the roles digital nonhumans perform in the production of a new visual regime with new capacities and desires. The shared human-nonhuman capacity of computer vision moves sight from the biological and linguistic assemblages of humans into digital assemblages where vision becomes calculable and subject to algorithmic modifications. The results are not only digitally-composed, screened images, but also new means of production, organization, and identity.
Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 