Chairman Bruce appears to be repubbing longreads from the now defunct Beyond The Beyond blog. This is a weird experience for me—distinctly atemporal, to use the man’s own term—because I recall reading this stuff at the time. And so it’s familiar and just-like-yesterday, but also so alienated and impossibly historical… I mean, I can’t recall the last time I saw anyone so much as mention the New Aesthetic, but I certainly remember a time when it seemed like everyone was talking about it. (That feeling of atemporal synchronicity is being compounded, no doubt, by my having been going through some of my own published material from the same period over the last couple of weeks… with the added irony that said act of retrospection was to the end of writing a chapter about Sterling for an academic collection.)
TL;DR—middle-age is a headfuck. I kind of understand why my parents went so weird in their forties, now… though I’m not sure I yet forgive the particular direction in which they went weird. And they didn’t even have the internet!
Anyway, the essay in question is the Chairman’s response to the New Aesthetic panel at the 2012 SXSW, and the bit I’m clipping is less about the New Aesthetic than a side-swipe at AI that reads just as true (and just as likely to be ignored) today:
… this is the older generation’s crippling hangup with their alleged “thinking machines.” When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see.
Modern creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art. That’s what is at stake.
Computers don’t and can’t make sound aesthetic judgements. Robots lack cognition. They lack perception. They lack intelligence. They lack taste. They lack ethics. They just don’t have any. Tossing in more software and interactivity, so that they’re even jumpier and more apparently lively, that doesn’t help.
It’s not their fault. They are not moral actors and they are incapable of faults. It’s our fault for pretending otherwise, for fooling ourselves, for projecting our own qualities onto phenomena that we built, that are very interesting to us, but not at all like us. We can’t give them those qualities of ours, no matter how hard we try.
Pretending otherwise is like making Super Mario the best man at your wedding. No matter how much time you spend with dear old Super Mario, he is going to disappoint in that role you chose for him. You need to let Super Mario be super in the ways that Mario is actually more-or-less super. Those are plentiful. And getting more so. These are the parts that require attention, while the AI mythos must be let go.
AI is the original suitcase word; indeed, it’s a term that Minsky came up with to describe the way the goal of “AI” kept drifting, and coming up with the term and identifying the problem didn’t get him anywhere nearer to solving it. I was writing a report on AI last year in a freelance capacity (for a foundation in a location whose commitment to the Californian Ideology is in some ways even greater than that of California itself, despite—or perhaps because of—its considerable geographical, historical and sociopolitical distance from California), and tried to make this point, drawing on the tsunami of critiques of AI-as-concept and AI-as-business-practice that have emerged since then, both within the academy and without… but, well, yeah.
I guess we just have to conclude that the sort of person who decides to make Super Mario their best man is not the sort of person who’s going to take it well when you point out that Super Mario is a sprite… no one wants to be the first to concede the emperor is naked, particularly not when they’ve stripped off in order to join the parade. Nonetheless, given the residual enthusiasm for peddling that particular brand of Kool-Aid which still persists among the big global consultancies, the McKinseys and their ilk, there’s probably a few more years in business models offering “Super Mario solutions” before smarter, faster-moving players start focussing on practical applications without the pseudo-religious wrapper. Or, I dunno, maybe not? Seems like people will believe whatever the hell makes them feel like a winner these days, and the very unfalsifiable nebulousness of “AI” might make it all but bulletproof for that very reason. Every era has its snake-oils.
