David Garcia via Nettime-tmp on Tue, 30 May 2023 15:31:18 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Corporate AI

Hi Andreas, thank you for such a thoughtful and typically probing response. I am yet to read Runciman's book as it is not due out for some months and I have just been exposed to this idea in conversation and his historical exploration of the origins of the modern secular state as a means of escaping the horrors of the religious wars. And how this was articulated by Thomas Hobbs as a kind of automaton or a Leviathan.
I agree with you that there are dangers in taking what is maybe just an analogy too literally but Hobbs' nightmarish vision of People (wishing to escape civil/religious wars) providing the state with its power, But being unable to control over the monster they had created quite resonant. Including the language of trade offs. The trade off for control over their own lives in exchange for giving life to an artificial creature that could underpin their shared existence. These kinds of trade-offs have been the legitimising narratives for countless authoritarian regimes ever since and I think Runciman is not wholly wrong in hearing their echoes in the lobbyists of Silicon Valley. 



On 2023-05-30 05:22, Andreas Broeckmann via Nettime-tmp wrote:

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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