AI: What Has Not Been Said
Much has been said about AI, but not this:
AI vastly empowers a regular person because we can all now create businesses, websites, content, characters, apps, art, storylines, research and more without needing to pay a Silicon Valley coder hundreds of thousands of dollars anymore. Yes, some people will lose their jobs to AI, but AI also empowers them to create and pursue new forms of work. But, even as AI enriches new forms of income for many, AI is also profoundly reorganizing the way we interface with reality itself. It may be causing crashes - plane crashes, train crashes, perceptual crashes, and, eventually, market crashes. This is because AI creates what Luciana Parisi calls “contagious architecture” that is disassociated from the underlying reality. Parisi writes (take a deep breath here because her work is brilliant but heavy):
“…the algorithmic processing of data is subtracting itself from the neuroontology of thought by injecting incomputable ideas into the extended codification of being. This has not resulted in a hyperactivity of sensing and thinking distributed across the networked infrastructures of spatiotemporal experience but instead in the neutralization or immobilization of sensing and cognition, which are now falling, as Shulgin’s Transitions suggest, into a pitch-black deep space of thought in which it is impossible to remember the past or predict the future.”
In other words, AI is constructing and drawing upon a new reality we trust more than actual reality. Our ability to distinguish between a real horse and a digital horse is less and less every day, witness the rise of metaverse horse racing. Algorithms have created a digital architecture, which is where decisions are now made. We need to ask whether this new hyper-data constructed space is sound architecture. Or, are these new digital constructs, this mega web of interacting data, dangerously flimsy and rooted in false foundations? Just as building standards matter for health and human safety, AI and digital computational architecture are creating objects and spaces that need to be checked for structural integrity.
We may think of the modern dataspace as all data points forming a matrix of points having Cartesian coordinates. But this is no longer true. “Digital space has become an evolving structure of relations” she writes. “What used to be a Euclidian grid is now a morphogenetic mesh that has emergent properties since the sensor inputs are themselves constantly changing.” A static grid of digital data points in a matrix has now become a fluid, ever-changing topological surface or a “sensuous skin” defined