This post is about agency. Obviously it is not an effort to be definitive about the question of agency! Can you imagine defining agency in a way that left us with nothing more to do?

No thanks.

This much I will say. I investigate agency as emerging in the encounter that forms the self and the other. Unless one envisions agency as somehow divine, I don’t see how else it can happen. This is not a radical approach. In face, I anticipate that you find it familiar and can cite several different theories that approach this in very different ways. In this respect, agency relies upon difference: the difference between me and you. If I become you because you are a lion and you ate me, then I cease being me. I can also cease being me if/when I am captured by the state ideology or culture. The state might execute or imprison me for example. My culture might seduce me into drug dependencies. It might steal my cultural acts and try to sell them back to me. Or turn them into an AI. There is no escaping culture but we are in constant tension and negotiation with social assemblages that desire our allopoietic service. In these matters, our own brains function to encourage our entrainment upon social collectives. Entrainment can be useful for survival, if it helps you trust your fellows well enough to sleep while they are taking turns watching the camp. However it is also a human tendency that is “hacked” by social assemblages to maintain territorialization.

In short, agency requires the ongoing negotiation for the preservation of negentropy and difference. Posthumanism recognizes that an obligation to maintaining human life, agency, and difference must be subsumed within a larger obligation not only to life but to negentropy itself. An obligation to negentropy is an obligation to oppose the reduction of difference to the same.

This is poststructuralism 101 IMHO.

A liberal arts critical-negentropic computer science would begin here. And this is where Stiegler comes it. As he argues, this move will require a redefinition of the machine, not as metaphor or algorithmic model, but as an arrangement of exosomatic organs whose material history and unfolding can never by fully captured by the Turing machine’s abstraction and reticulation. Similar work goes on elsewhere in posthumanism and in media studies, particularly in radical media archeology. But this is broadly the space in which I am thinking right now.

The promise of AI is the comfort and certainty of one answer. Our only worry seems to be that the one answer aligns with us somehow. If we are going to fixate on arriving at one answer, then I will go with none of the above. Those that are hidden below, however. They might be tasty. A liberal arts critical-negentropic computer science strikes me as the best mechanism academia has to respond to the will to AGI.

A move like this, or one similar to it, is crucial for us to undertake. We have to recognize that as producers of commercially valuable STEM knowledge, universities have commitments to adhering to hegemonic definitions of AI. Fortunately universities are not monolithic, or at least they used to not be. Regardless, it would be unreasonable (and more importantly a poor gamble) to expect that universities are already structured in a way as to respond with due critical engagement to AI. It would be unreasonable to expect a university or a part of a university, like a department, to formally operate in a counter-hegemonic way.

It’s the reason we can’t simply expect that universities will default to being protectors of life, sustainability, or negentropy. As neoliberal entities the drive of universities is precisely to reduce everything to the same. But that’s just what we all face, as I said above. We are in constant tension and negotiations with social assemblages that hack our tendencies for entrainment so that we can be captured and put to use serving the interests of the assemblage (e.g. the business, the college, the church, the Party, the family, etc.). Universities face similar negotiations: they also seek their own continued existence and thus their own difference from others, their own agency.

No one said these jobs would be easy…. or well paid. The money is definitely on the other side of this equation, funding paperclip maximizers of justice.

Oh, and HT to Annie for generating that bizarre post banner.