Michael Levin - "Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are)"

https://www.noemamag.com/living-things-are-not-machines-also-they-totally-are/

 

 

What places all these systems — living or not — on the same spectrum is the fact that all have aspects that are amenable to the mechanistic and agentic lenses, all exhibit surprises and competencies that our formal models do not capture, and none wear their capabilities and limitations on their sleeve (they must be determined by experiment).

An orthopedic surgeon should see your body as a simple, mechanical machine — they’ve got hammers and chisels, and their approach works very well for their remit. In contrast, a psychoanalyst should emphasize and help augment your growth as a free agent in search of meaning.

 

 

We need to come to grips with the fact that all our frames will miss important aspects of things, that it’s OK to say something about a system without claiming you’ve said everything, and that even the simplest of systems can exert surprising effects that reach higher on the continuum of agency than mere emergence of complexity or unpredictability.

Synthetic systems, which we might think are following an algorithm, may or may not have a degree of true mind, but that determination should not be based on their following an algorithm (any more than the reality of human minds isn’t revealed by their following of the laws of chemistry).

Tobias Rees - "Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture"

https://www.noemamag.com/why-ai-is-a-philosophical-rupture/

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

 

 

The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.

 

 

AI teaches us that this is not so. And not just AI, of course. Over the last two decades or so the concept of intelligence has multiplied. We now know that there are lots of other kinds of intelligence: from bacteria to octopi, from Earth systems to the spiral arms of galaxies. We are an entry in a series. And so is AI.

To argue that these other things are not “really” intelligent because their intelligence differs from ours is a bit silly. That would be like one species of birds, say Pelicans, insisting that only Pelicans “really” know how to fly.

 

 

The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves in ways no human interlocutor can, from outside of us, free from conversational narcissism.

 

In fact, one can push that a step further and say that AI systems appear to be capable of distinguishing truths from falsehoods. That’s because truth is positively correlated with a consistent logical structure. Errors, so to speak, are all unique or different. While the truth is not. And what we see in AI models is that they can distinguish between statements that conform to the patterns that they discover and statements that don’t.

So in that sense, AI systems have a nascent sense of truth.

 

 

Gardels: Karl Jaspers was best known for his study of the so-called Axial Age when all the great religions and philosophies were born in relative simultaneity over two millennia ago — Confucianism in China, the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, Homer’s Greece and the Hebrew prophets.

 

 

The practice of writing created new possibilities for analytical thinking that led to increasingly abstract, classificatory nouns and to a form of systematic search and production of knowledge that was not seen anywhere in human history before.

 

 

Fascinatingly, what emerges from this learning process is a high-dimensional, relational space that engineers call latent — in the sense of hidden — space.

 

It is just, and this is the third thing, that this spatial map doesn’t have only the three dimensions — length, width, depth — our conscious human mind is comfortable operating in. Instead, it has many, many more dimensions. Tens of thousands and with the latest models, perhaps millions.

That is, the understanding an LLM has formed is a spatial architecture. It has a geometry that literally determines what, for an LLM, is thinkable.

It is literally the logical condition of possibility — the a priori — of the LLM.

For all we know, human brains also create latent space representations. The neurons in our brain work in a very similar fashion to how neurons work in a neural network.

Yet, despite this similarity, it appears that the latent space representations that a human brain produces and the latent space representations that an AI can produce are different from one another.

 

 

 

Bauhaus School.

When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, in 1919, many German intellectuals were deeply skeptical of the industrial age. Not so Gropius. He experienced the possibilities that new materials like glass, steel and concrete offered as a conceptual rupture with the 19th century.

And so, he argued –– very much against the dominant opinion — that it was the duty of architects and artists to explore these new materials, and to invent forms and products that would lift people out of the 19th and into the 20th century.

Today, we need something akin to the Bauhaus — but focused on AI.

We need philosophical R&D labs that would allow us to explore and practice AI as the experimental philosophy it is. 

Oliver Milman - "The Cult of the American Lawn"

https://www.noemamag.com/the-cult-of-the-american-lawn/

 

 

The roots of this American obsession with a neat lawn are surprisingly shallow, initially imported from European sensibilities. Defenders of castles in medieval England and France would often cut back vegetation near the fortification to enable clear sight lines of potential invaders, an unintentional aesthetic that was later replicated in grand, sweeping lawns of aristocratic country estates.

 

Joe Zadeh - "The Shrouded, Sinister History of the Bulldozer"

https://www.noemamag.com/the-shrouded-sinister-history-of-the-bulldozer

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word "bulldozer" was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of "bullwhip," the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with "dose," as in quantity, with a "z" thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

If, like gods, we aspire to create machines in our own image, then it's fitting that the original bulldozers were humans. Leading up to the corrupted U.S. election of 1876, as the Southern states were being reconstructed following the Civil War, terrorist gangs of predominantly white Democrats roamed about, threatening or attacking Black men who they thought might vote for the Republican Party. The thugs were the bulldozers, and the acts they carried out were bulldozing.

It's not commonplace to associate bulldozers with war, and yet they were as important to the Allied victory as the aircraft engine, the radar or the atomic bomb. "Of all the weapons of war," wrote Colonel K.S. Andersson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1944, "the bulldozer stands first. Airplanes and tanks may be more romantic, appeal more to the public imagination, but the Army's advance depends on the unromantic, unsung hero who drives the `cat.'" The war was largely defined by control of the air, and airplanes needed airfields within operating range of their targets. If dispatched from seafaring aircraft carriers, then those ships needed docks and dry docks. And those airfields, docks and dry docks needed bases and road systems. In essence, for airplanes to stay mobile as the front shifted across the planet, an entire network of ordinarily immobile infrastructure had to become mobile to. Bulldozers move wars.

The bulldozer in this view was a creator, not a destroyer. Yet the legacy of that period still scars Guam, where the rainforest has fallen silent. The ships that brought the machines during and after World War II may have also accidentally carried with them an invasive species: the brown tree snake. With no natural predators, its population exploded, turning Guam into one of the most snake-infested places on Earth, wiping out 10 of its 12 native forest bird species by the 1980s and nearly erasing the sound of wild birdsong. Those birds used to eat the spiders and now there are too many of them, too.

But "illegality" in the built environment is extremely common in India. In Delhi alone, estimates suggest that anywhere between 30% and 80% or more of properties could be considered illegal.

"For many marginalized groups around the world, heavy earthmoving equipment has often been the visible part of the faceless bureaucratic megamachine that runs roughshod through communities in the name of urban renewal, beautification or 'slum' clearance."

"It was clear that it was only Muslim houses being targeted," [Fahad] Zuberi told me. In the wake of the demolitions, BJP politicians publicly celebrated them as a form of "vigilante justice," and the phenomenon became known as "bulldozer raj" (rule by bulldozer). The anti-Muslim overtones were clear: in a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, a BJP spokesperson equated the letters JCB with "jihadi control board."

 Around the country that year, widespread glorification of the machine engulfed certain sections of society. Processions of JCB vehicles started appearing at BJP political rallies, adorned in flowers and carrying people in their buckets, while crowds of onlookers waved toy bulldozers in the air. Pop songs about the machines racked up millions of hits on YouTube. Grooms rode to weddings atop earthmovers, and shops sold "JCB Gorilla" condoms - further emphasis on the machine's enduring associations with a particular notion of hypermasculine heroism. At a mass wedding in March, newlywed couples were given toy bulldozers as gifts to "symbolize the victory of good over evil and also order in life," according to a guest at the event.

JCB, or J.C. Bamford Excavators Limited, is a U.K. company founded in 1945 by Joseph Cyril Bamford, who began by making agricultural machines from war surplus materials in a rented garage. Today, the company is among the world’s largest manufacturers of construction machinery [...] The company is now run by Bamford’s son, Lord Anthony Bamford. 2024 was a good year for Bamford and his family, one of the wealthiest in the U.K. [...] Renowned as both a flamboyant socialite and political kingmaker, he’s among the top donors to the U.K. Conservative Party and is close friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose wedding he hosted in 2022. Bamford is also currently being investigated for hundreds of millions of pounds in tax avoidance. He and his wife, Lady Carole Bamford, live in the Cotswolds, a quaint pastoral utopia for the U.K.’s rich and famous, in a Georgian mansion once owned by a former British governor-general of India [...] The day after the destruction in Jahangirpuri, Lord Bamford happened to be in India with Johnson, who was still the U.K. prime minister. They were inaugurating a new JCB factory in Gujarat, the home state of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. At one point, Johnson climbed into the cab of a machine and leaned out to wave at photographers. Neither he nor Bamford made any comments to the press about the violence in Delhi.

A bomb is a clear and blatant act of violence, but a bulldozer can appear banal and bureaucratic. The violence the machine enacts is slow, rumbling, grinding, drawn out. Not an instantaneous vaporization.

In the spring of 2022, Russian soldiers looted 27 machines worth nearly $5 million from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, and shipped them 700 miles back to Russia. But when they tried to turn the machines on, they had been remotely "kill-switched" by the dealership. What enabled this remote disabling was a practice known as "VIN-locking," which manufacturers use to prevent unauthorized repairs to their products, instead requiring a licensed or official company technician to do so. It is a controversial practice that has been at the heart of the "right-to-repair" debate in the U.S. and has resulted in widespread "tractor hacking" by farmers who wish to mend their own equipment. As the sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow wrote in his analysis of the Melitopol story, "The technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters... [I]t was invented to thwart American farmers."

Ralph Waldo Emerson [in a book of essays "The Conduct of Life"], in one chapter titled "Fate," Emerson sought to address "the question of the times" - "How shall I live?" he wrote: "You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity."