This chapter delves into the intersection of octopuses and AI, discussing the unique abilities of octopuses in facing environmental challenges and their potential as a model for understanding different forms of intelligence. It also highlights the dangers of developing biased intelligence in AI systems and the need for diverse perspectives. The conversation further explores the concept of embodiment, contrasting intellect with physical wisdom, and delves into the implications of immersive technology and the metaverse on human interaction and life.
Could AI be a natural intelligence?
Artist Mer Maggie Roberts, cofounder of the collective Orphan Drift, has been investigating how the natural world can inspire technological development to resist continuing anthropocentrism. The more-than-human world has so many perspectives to offer which could open our eyes to our own blind spots, and encourage a politics of care, stewardship and understanding. We need diversity, more than ever, and not limited only to human experience. But AI, an unknowably powerful tool, is being coded in man’s image, with all the biases, reductionisms, flaws and dispassion we exhibit.
Maggie sought to open up the fields of possibility with a project that imagines training an AI model on the experience of an octopus. Octopi are multi-perspectival creatures, boasting one brain in each leg and a ninth, central brain in their body. The way they experience the world is complex, nuanced and utterly different to our own experience. Building technology which reflects rather than consumes the natural world could be a critical tool in marrying man’s relationship to the wider world, which we discuss in this wonderfully wide-ranging and nuanced conversation on the role of art in a crisis.
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