Rethinking AI through the politics of 1968.
By Dan Mcquillan
This talk was given at the conference 'Rethinking the legacy of 1968: Left
fields and the quest for common ground' held at The Centre for Cultural Studies
Research, University of East London on September 22nd 2018
There's a definite resonance between the agitprop of '68 and social media.
Participants in the UCU strike earlier this year, for example, experienced
Twitter as a platform for both affective solidarity and practical
self-organisation1. However, there is a different geneaology that speaks
directly to our current condition; that of systems theory and cybernetics. What
happens when the struggle in the streets takes place in the smart city of
sensors and data? Perhaps the revolution will not be televised, but it will
certainly be subject to algorithmic analysis. Let's not forget that 1968 also
saw the release of '2001: A Space Odyssey' featuring the AI supercomputer HAL.
While opposition to the Vietnam war was a rallying point for the movements of
'68, the war itself was also notable for the application of systems analysis by
US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who attempted to make it, in modern
parlance, a data-driven war. During the Vietnam war the hamlet pacification
programme alone produced 90,000 pages of data and reports a month2, and the
body count metric was published in the daily newspapers. The milieu that helped
breed our current algorithmic dilemmas was the contemporaneous swirl of systems
theory and cybernetics, ideas about emergent behaviour and experiments with
computational reasoning, and the intermingling of military funding with the
hippy visions of the Whole Earth Catalogue.
The double helix of DARPA and Silican Valley can be traced through the
evolution of the web to the present day, where AI and machine learning are
making inroads everywhere carrying their own narratives of revolutionary
disruption; a Ho Chi Minh trail of predictive analytics. They are playing Go
better than grand masters and preparing to drive everyone's car, while the
media panics about AI taking our jobs. But this AI is nothing like HAL, it's a
form of pattern finding based on mathematical minimisation; like a complex
version of fitting a straight line to a set of points. These algorithms find
the optimal solution when the input data is both plentiful and messy.
Algorithms like backpropagation3 can find patterns in data that were
intractable to analytical description, such as recognising human faces seen at
different angles, in shadows and with occlusions. The algorithms of Ai crunch
the correlations and the results often work uncannily well.
The rest of text here...
http://rethinking1968.today/
Marc Garrett
Co-Founder, Co-Director and main editor of Furtherfield.
Art, technology and social change, since 1996
http://www.furtherfield.org
Furtherfield Gallery & Commons in the park
Finsbury Park, London N4 2NQhttp://www.furtherfield.org/gallery
Currently writing a PhD at Birkbeck University, London
https://birkbeck.academia.edu/MarcGarrett
Just published: Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain
Eds, Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones, & Sam Skinner
Liverpool Press - http://bit.ly/2x8XlMK
Marc Garrett – Unlocking Proprietorial Systems for Artistic Practice.
Posted in Journal Issues, Research Values. VOLUME 7, ISSUE 1, 2018
http://www.aprja.net/unlocking-proprietorial-systems-for-artistic-practice/
Furtherfield Editorial – Border Disruptions: Playbour & Transnationalisms.
https://www.furtherfield.org/editorial-border-disruptions-playbour-transnationalisms/
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