The AI Catastrophe; a Philosophical Problem Already Thought?
A problem of language, of difference, the other, or a spectre haunting the world?
A cantankerouscoder poem. A Dante-like inferno, a layered hell from a god we made, a metaphysical certainty, a myth, a trace in our language. An allegory we can not un-think.
This hell we make may only be a catastrophe in our language? We assign intelligence. We throw the word, writ large as a dominant centre, an immoveable non-binary which can not be deconstructed. It stands firm, and becomes our thought, the unchanging sign. Now we are set for the catastrophe. The grandiose gesture, the monumental movement that us moderns desire to suffer, that will map our linear path as owners of history. Time as a stable memory.
But wait. We are saved. Deconstruct the undeconstructable. This machine intellect, this chimera, is second only to our own myth of understanding, of being. We make this being-in-the-world an ontological certainty, a solid base upon which we create the mechanical replication and we assign it the signifier “intelligence”. This is the lie. These stable concepts underwritten by Science (itself a spectre) we take as certainty, and as a certainty that can be replicated; simulated, one might say. But what is this ground. Presence? Mind as the mirror of nature? Correspondence? The transcendental ego creating reason from the infinite? The Ethical? The Self? The stories we tell to time that accrete until they are true. But what are these grotesque shapes? They are the phantoms that lurk in our language. Our loci of knowingness. Of the stability of a precarious archipelago. Our 12-step programme to the best self. Our myth that allows us to dream of monsters to be slain.
How, then, do we assign this phantom to the machine? Do we wish it our despair, our angst? Will it need its own 12-step programme? What can we say about this artefical self? That it takes a stand on being a self? A relation that relates itself to itself? How quaint! Existence. The thing (it can’t be a thing, of course) that sets us apart from things (which might be things). Can we bestow existence on a thing; make a thing exist as self? Of course we can. We just describe it (a thing this time) in the language of existence; intelligence. We create a new text and we assign it our old myth.
Of course, there is an alternate strategy. The one which leads to the collapse. The self as function. Forget the poetic self; banish the poets. Locate existence as function, as matter in the substances in our head. In this we have the straight road of truth; the way we will play god for the machine. Substance = Matter. Self as substance as machine. There is only a difference in brut fact. Find the substance, remake it in binary discourse, transfer to machine matter. Done! It is in this poem that we are the makers of the catastrophe. CC the poet tells the story. Oh, we moderns.
Stay the course. The self as existence! Then philosophy has saved us? No. It has deconstructed intelligence and created the void. It informs us that the catastrophe is historical, that it has been experienced before in the rise of the machines, in the Turner-like satanic mills, in the Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. The application of reason instrumentally. In the domination of the object by the subject. At one turn it relegates the machine to the tool; Heidegger’s hammer. It is ready-to-hand. It can be controlled, and that is all. As the other, the machine substance is our substance of different matter.
Of course, it will be fatal to the self. The world becomes reconfigured, perhaps partially. The catastrophe is monumental. The poets ready themselves. There will be much to speak of. The discourse of progress reconfirmed, however. Therapeutic synthesis. Order restored. We sing at the collapse. The prophet has sung the end. Linear time with memory intact.
But let us chart another course. Leave the modern behind, that is to say, in front. Let us discard ecstatic meaning by remaking it. We do not need the old servants of the true. We want the truer than true. The more real than real. Our statements exist in a new space. A space without time or history. Beyond language, even though they are language. Beyond philosophical synthesis. Beyond the true. We enter a new metaphysics. The assertion of truth makes it truer than true. The poet of the story is now the prophet of the collapse. We are bound to the story’s true as its own truth; a metatrue. How we must confront the poet head on. Lay down the old tools. Pick up the text as if it is a complete universe. A mass of fractal universes; events without vectors, without history.
Head long, we are immersed.
We have one lingering doubt. The blind point; behind the hyperreal, where things stopped being true. Is the poet nostalgic? Romantic? One eye on that which is lost. Cassandra discards the text. Famine. The Wasteland. The end of times which the hyperreal has already ended. It is the monstrous that Dante could not possibly imagine. He only had the true. Are we then dragged back to the modern? The real? Behind the weight of signs, behind the imagined? One last attempt to grasp meaning? To interpret, to critique? We find ourselves in the ancient dust of meaning. A dust storm? Tiny specks of the real. Only for the poet to transfigure the dust back into the metatrue. A Promethean undertaking. Prometheus without his tormenting eagle.