The Superplay Report #14: "What remains when intelligence becomes cheap? Presence, embodiment, ritual" (and more)

INTRO (scroll down for new leads):

What do I mean by ‘superplay’? It’s an element of our current condition—where our natural capacities for envisioning and rehearsing (that is, play) escape their sandbox, and quickly become consequential in the world.

They escape because powerful technologies - specifically the accelerating computations of AI - keep breaking the barriers between what we can imagine and what we can make.

This regular report will aim to catch this superplay as it arises in the world, and notes who’s wielding its powers (and who isn’t—yet). It’s also a taster for deeper dives into creativity, radical technology and power, undertaken by Superplay Consultancy (for services and rates, contact here)

A treasure-trove of humanist wranglings with the power of AI this week. First off, this elegant Noema piece from Open AI’s Houda Nait El Barj:

Before AI, we created spiritual beings and narratives to find meaning: stories anchored in a sacred past, an idealized future, a counterfactual life beyond this one. We used the past, the future and the invisible to understand the present.

AI may invert this dynamic. It may help us find meaning by intensifying our attention to this life rather than pointing beyond it. It may help us understand our own minds. It may make this life feel more intelligible and more livable. That is a magnificent possibility, and I believe it is real.

But the same systems could also make it easier to avoid the conditions through which meaning becomes real: other people, bodily vulnerability, obligation, patience, grief, moral difficulty, shared time.

AI is helping us become more human. It is also helping us hide from being human. So what remains when intelligence becomes cheap? Presence. Embodiment. Ritual. Family. Friendship. Love.

The courage to participate in the lives of others without control. The willingness to be changed by people who are not designed for us. The inward work of becoming a self that cannot be generated, only lived.

The great scarcity of the future may be reality raw enough to form us.

Or perhaps the scarcity will be civilisational and paradigmatic - what grand underlying assumptions about reality and other humans are operating, in this particular AI? Here’s an attempt to think through what an African AI would be like, from Aeon, guided by the concepts of Hunhu/Ubuntu (exemplified by the Nguni/Shona proverb Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – “a person is a person through other persons”).

A Hunhu/Ubuntu-informed AI would prioritise collective agency over individual preference, serve the common good rather than aggregate personal satisfactions, and build in transparency and accountability to the communities affected.

And it would take environmental sustainability as an expression of Hunhu/Ubuntu’s commitment to the symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature, and to the intergenerational obligations that bind together the past and the future.

There are, however, fundamental structural problems to accomplishing this. Africa has been excluded from the benefits of past industrial revolutions, just as it is from the current one, and according to the same logic: the Global North designs and exports the technology, forcing the Global South to accept it without any say in its standards or applications – a merely updated version of the old colonial harm.

And it’s worth wondering whether AI developers would cede ground in the first place by adopting a Hunhu/Ubuntu ethical framework. What’s in it for them?

There is also the question of abstraction: Hunhu/Ubuntu speaks with great power about interconnectedness, solidarity and communal dignity, but translating those values into the specific, enforceable rules that AI governance requires is exquisitely hard work.

Finally, the individualism embedded in AI reflects values that urbanisation and modernity have spread widely, including across Africa itself. A Hunhu/Ubuntu framework would need to reckon with that complexity.

Coming around on the other side of the task here - that is, reforming Western AI’s individualist assumptions (with individuals imputed on either side of the chatbot interface) - is Chinese techno-society’s rootedness in Confucian world views. Again it’s Noema, and its photographer/sinologist Jacob Dreyer, grounding this. Some excerpts from this essay:

…AI will not converge China and America into any one system. It will refract their civilizational logics into distinct technological futures: America’s restless frontier vs. China’s paternalist social engineering. Both futures make important things visible, though in radically different ways.

…The U.S. will use, or be used by, AGI in the service of American goals and American problems: patchy regulation, a dominant private sector, a cacophony of voices pursuing ever more complex advances without pausing to ask why. We can imagine the future of American science and thought processes tracking north, bathed in blue light.

China’s AGI, in contrast, colored red heads southward, toward the regulation of everyday life, an extended hand offering a generic standard of living for its masses.

…Coexisting with an Other that might be helpful but is indifferent and possibly predatory, accepting what is uncontrollable or incomprehensible — these are tendencies that do not come naturally to Americans, whose cultural habit is to organize events in an effort to master them.

In China, society trundles on, automatic and without much passion, the secret engines of the future churning, building a new world in which human intelligence is neither alone nor superior.

…This is how AI will make the invisible Chinese visible — not by eliminating poverty through a single breakthrough, but by integrating the rural underclass into the same informational infrastructure that already shapes urban life.

…These are the projects of the Chinese state, which doesn’t seek to profit from equity valuations or returns on investment, but rather sees the Chinese population as its most basic form of capital. By using AI to “upgrade” the rural population — to bring them into the fold — the Chinese government hopes to drive economic growth and invent new applications and uses for AI.,,

…America is a society where the brilliant thrive and the average suffer. China is precisely the reverse. More complex societies are more costly to maintain than simple ones. Is the American social structure more fragile than the Chinese one? Does that mean that China’s approach, more prosaic than poetic, focused on meeting material needs rather than searching for the unknown and divine, will be more likely to succeed?

It’s hard to imagine American AI succeeding right now, if only because there is no consensus on the definition of success. Chinese AI will be successful if the specific goals of the five-year plan are met.

Worth also tracking back to philosopher Yuk Hui’s 2020 interview in the same publication:

It is not just about whether China can develop a better algorithm for its social credit system or whether it can develop better 5G technology — both contribute to the mono-technological culture of the present. The more fundamental question is how a cosmotechnics rooted in Chinese thought could develop an entirely new framework for what has been understood in the West as scientific “progress.”

Some have quipped that what I am speaking about is Daoist robots or organic AI … that sounds really exotic. But on the other hand, we can understand these quips as invitations to reflect on how non-European thought can intervene in the technological acceleration that we have today and change course.

Finally, it’s fun (in a dark way) to discover the games-maker and academic Max Haiven. The notable quote from his piece on how 21st century fascism is about resentful failed entrepreneurs (or “vengeful players”), rather than transfixed masses, is below;

…If we learn anything from the devolution of financialized capitalism into 21^st century fascism it should be to attend to the power of agency.

Financialized capitalism captures and exploits us in large part by seducing and exciting our agency, our freedom to act strategically within artificial constraints, structures and scarcities we mistake for natural, necessary or inevitable.

A world of relentless and merciless competition is sold to us as liberation and opportunity.

21^st century fascism does not emerge from the zombie-like ideology of the mass following the god-like dictator, but the ideological entrepreneurialism of millions of would-be players.

Fascistic spectacles and political communities reflect this: they offer their participants the feeling of competitive volition, ephemeral community and individual agency in a world where, otherwise, most of us feel like losers or NPCs.

As Jacob Dreyer says in his piece: “For those of us who are simply passengers observing this journey, the years to come will feel like we are changing both individually and as a species, alone and in a swarm of people, almost as if by instinct. Is that what evolution feels like?”

Hopefully, a series of commonplaces like this helps it to be understood, as well as felt.

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