REIMAGINING THE SELF IN A DISTRIBUTED WORLD

MATTHEW RITCHIE

Artist

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Will it happen? It already has. With the gradual fusion of information-storing-and-reporting technologies at the atomic and molecular scales, and the scaling up of distributed and connected information-storing-and-reporting devices at the social and planetary scale (which already exceeds the number of human beings on the planet), the definitions of both machine and thinking have shifted to embrace both inorganic and organic “complexes” and “systemic decisions” as interchangeable terms—mechanically, biologically, physically, intellectually, and even theologically.

Near-future developments in biotechnology and transhuman algorithmic prediction systems will quickly render many of the last philosophical distinctions between observing, thinking, and deciding obsolete, and quantitative arguments meaningless. Once those barriers are crossed and the difference between “a machine that thinks” and “a biological system that thinks” becomes trivial, the focus immediately shifts to qualitative questions—human definitions of intentionality and agency for thinking machines.

What will that mean for us? Does the existence of thinking machines—whether arranged in an inorganic or quantum array or a biochemical holarchy—diminish human agency or extend it? Are we willing to extend our definition of ourselves not just to authored and mechanical systems but to the independent and symbiotic systems that already inhabit us—the trillions of bacteria in our gut (which alter our mental states by manipulating chemical pathways) and the biochemical trackers, agents, and augmentals we ingest? What will it mean to fully extend ourselves into and through thinking machines?

An AI will quickly find its way to the world library, the Web. Once there, it will join the many quasi-human systems, distributed crowd intelligences, and aggregated thinking machines already inhabiting this space and will quickly learn to generate or simulate the models of continuous conscious reflectivity and mirror selves found there and easily reproduce or co-opt the apparently complex alternative identities and ambiguities that define the Web.

Drawing distinctions between the real and unreal for an independent, evolving, functional, intelligent system will be the most significant discussion of all. How will it be taught? In object-oriented ontology, the universe is presented as already being full of objects and qualities, which are constituted into meaningful systems by human consciousness. Just what are the qualitative differences between spontaneously created thinking systems—or composites of objects and qualities—and artificially created thinking systems? What will happen if or when one of these rejects or surpasses the essential philosophies of its makers?

Redefining the nature and role of the human thinking self, as a self-othering, self-authoring, and self-doctoring system whose precise nature and responsibilities have been argued about since the Enlightenment, will be a critical question, linked to questions of shared community and our willingness to address the ethical determination and limits of independent systems whose real-world consequences cannot be ignored. Are such systems alive? What are their rights and responsibilities? Since the Supreme Court decisions that elevated corporations to the status of individuals, we’ve accepted the legal precedent that nonhuman aggregated “thinking machines” can be an integral part of our political and cultural life and struggled with how to restrain nonhuman systems in human terms. It will be no small task to integrate the complex and diverse human ethical, creative, and representational belief systems into a meaningful civic process that defines an ability to think as a basis for citizenship.

The weakest counterargument against the thinkinghood of artificial life, often coming from the humanities, is a vaguely medieval, mystical assertion that human perceptions of symmetry and beauty can never be matched by machines. It’s an article of faith in the interpretive arts that a machine can never do a human being’s work—but it’s just a comforting illusion to suppose that the modest aesthetic standards of any given contemporary taste cannot be codified and simulated. Machines already perform bestselling pop songs and take spectacular photographs of other planets and stars. There are already video games as beautiful as films. Whether a thinking machine can learn how to write a symphony or sketch a masterpiece is only a question of time. Perhaps a more significant question is whether it can learn how to make a great work of art, ultimately achieving through sheer capacity what no human could through improvisation. Part of the enormously larger and newly horizontal distributed network of cultural practice, supported by new technologies, has indeed begun to fall into what Jaron Lanier has described as “hive thinking,” supporting the gloomiest cultural predictions.14 But as Heidegger proposed, the danger of unexamined scientific rationalism is that the most reductive definition of object as “machine” or “system” can be extended to the universal scale in every sense, becoming a self-justifying and ethically vacant rationale for the mechanization of the self. The ensuing fantasies—Samuel Butler’s vital machines, H. G. Wells’s shadowy world of make-work, or the fear of becoming components in a supersystem or matrix—are primarily failures of human imagination.

The emergence and definition of new kinds of dynamically aggregated “information citizens,” and aggregated working platforms whether collective or individual, biological, corporate, national, or transnational, present us with a vast new opportunity—not as members of one species, or as specific composites of objects and qualities, but as a new kind of people—co-owners of an information culture, economy, and ecology, who have, as our shared birthright, access to every culture and every system.

Perhaps hybrid-human-object-system thinking machines are already becoming a vast new source of energy for a depleted historical environment. Perhaps we even have an opportunity to redefine the trajectory for artistic practice altogether. Can the time of emergence for thinking machines inspire us to reimagine and redefine what it is to be truly human, to extend ourselves into the infinite? It already has.