04 / October 5

A Pervasive Global Cognitive Automaton

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?”
— Open letter from tech CEOs suggesting an AI moratorium

Topics

Planetary computation: platform, stack, model, machine; Charles Stross’ “very slow AIs” to imperceptible algorithmic value extraction devices; social, walled gardens, and yield farms; Trapwire, Predpol, Palantir, and pernicious feedback loops; memesis, thought contagion, media decentralization, and stochastic terror; Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the Imitation Game, ELIZA, facebotlish, ChatGPT; Strategy of Tension and TAO — Xkeyscore, Foxacid, Quantumsquirrel, Weeping Angel; Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy; Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis; Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism and psychic infrastructure; aggregators, signal boosters, pirate funnels, and viral loops; Jimi Hendrix and positive feedback; Guattari, Integrated World Capitalism, molecular revolution, and asignifying semiotics; negative feedback, cybernetics, governors, and territorialization; feedforward nets and feedback in art; I.J. Good’s ultraintelligent machine; astrobiology and post-biological evolution; exocapitalism, CCRU, Orphan Drift, cyberpositive, machinic desire v. postcapitalist desire

Readings 4

Platform and Stack, Model and Machine Benjamin H. Bratton Integrated World Capitalism and Molecular Revolution Félix Guattari Acid Communism Matt Colquhoun Notes on Foxacid, Quantumsquirrel, Weeping Angel Scott Benzel

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 6

Cosmic Evolution, from Cosmos and Culture Steven J. Dick Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine I.J. Good The Cybernetic Hypothesis Tiqqun SF Capital Mark Fisher ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines Yuk Hui Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control, Updated for Big Data and Predictive Analytics James Brusseau

Lab

TBD