Re: <nettime> Corporate AI

[Andreas Broeckmann via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

Dear David,

thank you for your message and for the book reference.

The title, Handover, sounds rather alarmist and suggests the kind of 
antagonism between "humans" and "machines" which has been the staple of 
modern theories of technology (e.g. in Mumford's "Myth of the Machine", 
1967/1970, where he uses the notion of the "mega-machine" to describe 
the state-military-industrial-apparatus). Ignoring, I would argue, that 
the modernist notion of the "human" is predicated on an increasing 
articulation of homo sapiens by technoscientific paradigms. Or, to put 
it differently: there is no "us" versus "them", there are only different 
aspects of "us". Because "them" is us; we are cyborgs, something we have 
been learning since Donna Haraway wrote our manifesto in the early 1980s.
Secondly, and less affirmatively, I would suggest to distinguish between 
the abstracted forms of social organisation, like institutions and 
corporations, and the material concretisations of physics and 
mathematics which we call technology (or rather, technics). They look 
similar, but they are significantly different types of 
"artificialities": political agency can in fact change the rules (laws) 
under which institutions and corporations can act, whereas the laws of 
physics and mathematics cannot be changed by politics, but only their 
application (and the applications of technologies).
I hope for help from the political theorists on the list to explain this 
better, but I think that the notion of "Corporate AI" is the result of a 
dangerous confusion of such technical and social paradigms. (Or maybe 
Francis Hunger can expand on what is wrong with the notion of "AI", and 
what that critique means for the claim of corporations working like 
"intellgent machines", or "robots".)
Regards,
-a

Am 30.05.23 um 11:15 schrieb David Garcia via Nettime-tmp:
> In August this year political historian David Runciman will publish 
> ‘Handover’ where he argues that a few hundred years ago, humans started 
> building the robots that now rule our world.
> They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial 
> entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, 
> and which, unlike us, need never die. The book attempts to distil over 
> three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.
> But in some ways the book is late to the table. To take just one example 
> in 2003 Mark Achbar’s documentary The Corporation could also be seen as 
> reminder that corporations have as Runciman argues "a lot in common with 
> what we call AI. They are artificial decision-making machines, they are 
> inhuman, they don’t have a conscience, they don’t have a soul. They have 
> a memory, but it is not a human memory. corporations are smart but its 
> not human intelligence..” in that their overriding objectives transcend 
> human flourishing. Moreover at the moment it’s the most inhuman of the 
> corporate agents that we have that are in charge of machine learning 
> technologies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU5-hbxwUX
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