04 / October 5

Feedback

“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?”
— Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter, The Future of Life Institute, 2023

Topics

Jimi Hendrix and positive feedback; Félix Guattari, Integrated World Capitalism, molecular revolution, asignifying semiotics, and signaletic matter; negative feedback, cybernetics, governors, and territorialization; feedforward nets and feedback in art; I.J. Good's Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine; Steven J. Dick, astrobiology, intelligence, positive feedback, and post-biological evolution; cyberpositive, CCRU, Orphan Drift, and exocapitalism; prediction market and AI symmetry, Polymarket, Kalshi, futarchy, and hype-vorticism; a pervasive global cognitive automaton; planetary computation: platform, stack, model, machine; Charles Stross's very slow AIs to imperceptible algorithmic value extraction devices; walled gardens, yield farms, distillation; Trapwire, Predpol to Palantir, Flock, and pernicious feedback loops; memesis, thought contagion, media decentralization, and stochastic terror; Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence, the Imitation Game, ELIZA, facebotlish, chatbots, sexbots, superpersuasion; Strategy of Tension and TAO: Xkeyscore, Foxacid, Quantumsquirrel, Weeping Angel; Lyotard's Libidinal Economy; Tiqqun's Cybernetic Hypothesis; Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism and psychic infrastructure

Readings 3

Integrated World Capitalism and Molecular Revolution Félix Guattari Platform and Stack, Model and Machine Benjamin H. Bratton Acid Communism Matt Colquhoun

Additional Reading & Primary Documents 2

Cosmic Evolution, from Cosmos and Culture Steven J. Dick Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine I.J. Good

Lab

Lossmaxing

Gradient descent + loss, cognitive displacement
How do we plan? Where do we place effort and critical thought within automation?
What do we need to do ourselves that supersedes optimization efficiency principles?
Decision making

October 12 — No class (Indigenous People’s Day)