Toward Alien Cosmologies,

Artificial Intelligence – i.e. algorithmic reasoning and machine learning – is not new, but the recent acceleration of calculation capacities and the sheer quantity of data available for training has allowed AI to be introduced in every facet of our existence on an unprecedented scale. This could be seen as just another advance in technology but, since AIs operate as black boxes, ‘mysterious machines’ [1] or alien knowledge, even their designers are not able to understand and justify their decision-making. This lack of explicability is at the heart of our fear and suspicion of AI – as though it is akin to a new form of magic.

Exactly what or who is AI? And what gives it the right to advise us, challenge us or take decisions for us? Accidents involving autonomous vehicles have already prompted the question, from a legal perspective, as to who is responsible: the company that manufactures the car or its designers, both of whom have been involved in setting up the hardware and software for decision-making.

Or is the vehicle an autonomous being acting on its own will? Conceptually, it is a fertile, rather than an extravagant, hypothesis to see AIs as a new family of algorithmic alien beings taking part in our social, mental and natural ecosystems, somewhere between the human (complex abstract reasoning capacity), the animal (non-human opaque behaviour) and machines (man-made and controlled artefacts). Designing future alien cosmologies means re-modelling the borders between these realms, at a time where they are challenged both physically and ontologically. In their eponymous 2016 publication, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley ask: ‘Are We Human?’, proceeding to then detail how humanity has been continuously redesigning its own conditions throughout history. [2]

In physical terms, the frontier of biology and bio-engineering research shows that living cells can be fully designed, programmed and even 3D printed, denoting a new level of human mastery over life and living organs. The human body can be augmented with machinic and cyborg-like exo-skeletons to overcome disability [3] and even, as in the case of former Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, to compete against and outperform non-augmented humans.

Medical science is similarly engaging with a new phase of evolution, concerning both reproduction and gender differentiation. What does ‘health’ mean under these new paradigms? When human senses can now be remodelled via different ‘mutant’ experiments, such as implants and biohacking, are we healing our bodies or improving them? Beyond this, digital technologies are even seeking to defy the physical limitation of death. These are not marginal experiments: technologies directly controlled by brain waves are already fully functioning and ready to be mass-marketed. As the Cyborg Foundation claims on its website: ‘We are the first generation able to decide what organs and senses we want to have.’ [4]

Exhibitions such as ‘New Sensorium’ at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2016 have highlighted artists’ engagement with the digital era’s transformation of human sensorial capacities and aesthetic codes, while Ian Cheng’s artificial life form project BOB (Bags of Belief) (2018–19) demonstrates how AI can assume many guises and can align with art to reflect mankind’s multitude of ambiguities, biases and distortions.

The distinction between human brain and machine mind is also becoming increasingly porous, with the one acting as a dynamic mirror to the other. While algorithms, in all their cognitive diversity, are showing affinities to (and differences from) human intelligence – sometimes mimicking it, sometimes overperforming it – we are still not entirely certain how the human mind functions.

Neuroscience and philosophy have remained separate fields for too long: now, they are in the process of resetting their disciplines to explore new convergences and confront the algorithmic evolution in different ways. In their recent publications, Yuval-Noah Harari [5] and Catherine Malabou [6] have argued that even the recognized human attribute of consciousness is becoming less concrete, demonstrating how the mind has its own ‘automatism’ that comes into play when making supposedly conscious decisions.

Is the human brain just as filtered by opaque biases as AI? Where do intelligence, truth and wisdom fit into all this? Human ethical and philosophical frameworks are being profoundly challenged by these new developments, consolidating the need for innovative, alien cosmologies.

Now omnipresent, computers and smartphones already dictate many of our life decisions, whether private, social or professional. Via our interactions with them, these machines participate in what Gilbert Simondon [7] calls the trans-individuation process – i.e. the construction of ourselves, both individually and collectively, as well as the design of societal networks and communities.

In recent decades, digital humanities have been highlighting these mechanisms and social transformations; with the introduction of AI, such relational patterns have led to the development of a new sociopsychology, beyond the interactive and the functional. Like personal assistants, machines have become increasingly tailored to our needs, mimicking us as individuals, and generating ever-more sophisticated, empathic, emotional and cognitive mechanisms and exchanges.  A new society is emerging in which machines are stakeholders and anthropological definitions continue to evolve.

In work environments, the fear of seeing AI replace human labour is real and has been heightened by the general fragmentation and dissolution of workloads via the micro-tasking [8] economy and the shift from large corporations to informal organizations and peer-to-peer communities [9]. Yet, closer analysis reveals that AIs and machine learning – whether in the form of robots or bot interfaces – cannot deliver results without being trained and cared for by humans. This, again, mirrors how humans themselves develop skills. At a time when the knowledge economy is transforming in all fields – from academia and industry to the arts and third sector – this educational revolution, in which AI will play a pivotal role, is a subject of ongoing debate.

Ultimately, however, bias and value systems, as much as efficiency and responsibility, are at stake in this total reset of education, culture, economics and productivity.

The new alien cosmologies will involve these pioneering forms of training reciprocity and collaborative engagement (unlike the late-20th-century modes of communication that adhered to the information paradigm) and will call for fair-play guidelines that serve social justice. The relationship between humans and machines creates various interdependencies ranging from valuable support to subordination and even alienation.

Sentiments are provoked by these psycho-tech entanglements, especially when AIs coach or give advice. By providing feedback based on users’ mindscapes, AIs influence our quest for identity as much as they guide our decision-making – flattering our narcissism, fulfilling our demands for love and soothing our insecurities.

‘You look so good today,’ says your ideal augmented deep-fake persona and new friend. ‘You will never be alone.’ The pre-existing gamut of psychological games, rewarding mechanisms and social-structing [10] patterns can so easily be implemented with AI that users must remain ever-vigilant to the neural machinations in progress. The invisible workings of the market are also getting smarter and, as we know, employing all sorts of tricks to manipulate us into believing their promises.

Unsurprisingly, feminine, sexualized AIs – caricatures of female instrumentalization – have proved successful in making AIs acceptable. They are kind and charming (the good girl), attentive (the good friend), entertaining and exciting (the escort, the prostitute) but no smarter than men: docile (the secretary), servile (the maid) and caring (the nurse).

By investing AIs with characteristics stereotypically perceived as female, fears around loss of control are abated while reciprocal empathy with the smart machine is prompted, at a time when for some, relationships between humans are increasingly volatile and disappointing. Sadly, this recalls (but also offers a new perspective on) the historical subordination of women by men.

Fear has been pivotal to the construction of that humanity-long history and anthropological bedrock. Finding solutions for the now-acknowledged risk of AIs’ gender or racial bias will certainly help to deconstruct this thread, rendering more transparent implicitly distorted value systems in men’s habits, such as those in recruitment, editorial or curating.

As part of the current anthropological turn toward alien cosmologies, AIs, with their presumably arbitration skills and ethical challenges, contribute to the redefinition of power, subordination and organizational models. Feminism offers a relevant conceptual matrix from which to draw new, impartial, inter-species relations, collaborations, organizations and justice.

Beyond the ontological and relational, the AI paradigm not only conjures new constellations, values and representational systems, which influence our minds as much as AIs, but also new ambient technology ecosystems, fully entangled with socio-political and natural ecosystems.

Whether we speak of block-chain decentralized networks, of 5G technologies that increasingly connect, augment and accelerate, or of the cloud now populated with billions of smart bots and algorithmic entities, the digital realm is limitless. Its sprawling sensors, data and AIs not only serve ethically dubious purposes – political surveillance, social-credit checks, facial recognition, information distortion, military strategy, etc. – but are intrinsic to essential services such as health care and climatology and, consequently, will only continue to expand. Prompting radical criticism [11], the Anthropocene is fast becoming the byword for a new era of manmade geo-engineering that has ushered in global power and economic games.

In the midst of all this, the pertinent question we should really be asking is: what environmental governance could we design to reach a Green New Deal [12]? American communications giant OneWeb is building a network of satellites across Earth to enable permanent connectivity and so does China with the Hongyan constellation. Autonomous AIs will soon lead space-exploration vehicles [13], in a bid to expand human life into outer space, raising further anthropological concerns [14]. Both physically and conceptually, the AI era is of cosmological order, and thus cosmological theories can be of help in better grasping or representing the ubiquitous, multi-dimensional and distorted world being created.

Politically, alien cosmologies would need to include natural and intelligent entities – at the intersection of the cosmopolitical ‘Parliament of Things’, proposed by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern (1991), and Antoinette Rouvroy’s research into algorithmic democracy [15].

Spatially, we need to devise ‘cosmo-geographic’ maps in order to visualize the entanglement of virtual and real ecosystems, as well as to shed light on the invisible constellations of the digital AI era. Such efforts could help forge cognitive common ground with the black boxes of AIs, since their algorithmic ‘mind’ does not have a sense of space or gravity.

Knowledge, truth and value systems are everywhere at stake in these post-human and post-truth alien cosmologies. The current ‘biology of disinformation’ [16] – unmoderated propaganda and viral media manipulation effective on a global scale – is not based on clear logic and intersects with the indistinct zone of our emotions, reptilian imagination and unconscious belief mechanisms.

The new ecology and economy of fear (and, with it, our hopes – demands – for salvation) are re-orienting, challenging or rendering obsolete the libidinal economy of desire. Both nestle in the part of our brain beneath rationale and ethics, adjacent to our innate comfort zone. Tapping into these existential human uncertainties – particularly in tandem with AI’s ‘magical’ power – is both alarming yet mesmerizing. Mimicking religious messianic or esoteric narratives, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005) – which predicts such an exponential increase in technology that machine intelligence will far outstrip human intelligence – also plays on our innate risk-averse vulnerability.

In response, more holistic concepts, such as the pluriversity (the post-decolonization alternative to the universal dissemination of a Eurocentric model) or cosmo-technics (the conceptualization of a renewed relation between nature and technology, developed by Chinese philosopher Yuk Hui [17]) are proposing new technological futures, prompting discerning and emancipatory thinking.

What is missing in the current intellectual landscape – which has only recently become a concern in anthropological studies [18] but will be pivotal to designing alien cosmologies – is humanity’s dynamic and creative relationship to the future. Every facet of human existence is informed and influenced by this subjective and approximate computation. Occurring at the intersection of the real, the rational and the fictional, it provokes as much as fear as it inspires desire, agency and belief. To the opposite of science that is not meant to tell or demonstrate the future, predictive AIs are already massively influencing human future speculations.

The arts also play their part, having always served as lens through which to apprehend the future imaginings of its time. And more esoteric sciences start making sense at this frontier of the known and of the rational. Hydro-feminism (Neimas) emphasises the continuity of water and information between the inside and the outside of humans and relevantly defies the continuity/discontinuity anthropological matrix designed by Descola. Afro-futurism, which sees human as aliens, gives space to the invisible and reactivates a creative and projective relation to the cosmos to envision social justice, is also a valid inspiration.

The cosmos is a historical reflector of mankind’s comprehension of its future, acting as a screen onto which we project more or less idealized scenarios: from a house of god(s) that rules the world to a thrilling alien, non-gravitational playground to a potential means of survival and battle field.

What peaceful and resilient alien cosmologies can we design on that horizon to emancipate ourselves from these overly simplistic, fear-driven caricatures and futures? This is the first step we must take to address the Anthropocene and AI era, to reboot our mindset and lifestyles at the edge of the human condition, of science and of the future.

1 – Title of cover story about AI, MIT Technology Review, May/June 2017
2 – B. Colomina and M. Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, Lars Müller Publishers, 2016
3 – See cases of formerly disabled, ‘bionic’ men such as rock climber Hugh Herr or body builder Edgard John-Augustin
4 – Quote from www.cyborgfoundation.com
5 – Y.N. Harari, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, Harvill Secker, 2016
6 – C. Malabou, Métamorphoses de l’intelligence, Presses Universitaires de France, 2017
7 – G. Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective, Paris, Aubier, 1989
8 – See the TaskRabbit.com platform developed by Amazon
9 – The music and media industries were among the first affected by job losses, due to the rise of informal content production on streaming platforms such as YouTube; apps like uber have extended this process while white collar and cognitive services are now becoming affected.
10 – See Marina Gorbis, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World, 2013
11 – See: T.J. Demos ‘To Save a World: Geo-engineering, Conflictual Futurisms and the Unthinkable’, e-flux journal #94, 2018
12 – J. Rifkin, The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth, St Martin Press, 2019
13 – In 2018, for instance, Nasa placed the robot CIMON aboard the International Space Station.
14 – See: ‘Toward an Anthropology of Space; Orientating Cosmological Futures’, a conference at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, 2017
15 – ‘The end(s) of critique: data-behaviourism vs. due-process’, in Hildebrandt, M. and De Vries, E. (eds.) Privacy, Due process and the Computational Turn: Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology, Routledge, 2012
16 – See: J. Dunagan, D. Pescovitz and D. Rushkoff, ‘The Biology of Disinformation’ report, Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, 2018
17 – Y. Hui, ‘Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics’, e-flux journal #86, 2017
18 – Among many recent publications showing the rising concern for the future in the anthropology community see: S. Pink and J.F. Salazar, Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds, Bloomsbury, 2017