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The discussion highlights the growing complexity and ambiguity surrounding advanced technologies, with technologists behaving like priests due to their interpretative roles in the face of opaque systems. With the inner workings of these technologies often hidden from view, individuals involved in developing them become reliant on hermeneutics, requiring philosophical and theological insights to grasp their implications. There is a recognition that not all technologists are equipped with the necessary background in these fields, leading to the need for diverse thinkers who can step outside the materialist paradigm. This commentary emphasizes the urgency for interdisciplinary approaches to really understand the ramifications of our technological advancements.
A significant point raised is whether we are still part of modernity or if we have already transitioned into a new era marked by machine superintelligence. The dialogue encourages reflection on the current status of civilization and our relationship with technology, stressing the unpredictable nature of exponential technological growth. Historical assessments, suggesting that we may have never been truly modern, are brought into consideration, pushing the audience to rethink whether we’ve effectively grasped the implications of our actions. This discourse calls for a critical examination of our collective trajectory and the potential need for new narratives.
The conversation delves into the effects of AI and generative technologies on traditional artistic and writing practices. There are mixed sentiments about whether such technologies dilute the quality and originality of creative work or enhance it, as they arguably facilitate smoother and more polished outputs. Concerns arise regarding the implications for emerging artists who find themselves overshadowed by AI's capabilities, leading to existential questions about the future of art and writing professions. However, there's an acknowledgment that these technologies could also provide novel avenues for exploration, creativity, and inspiration if approached correctly.
A profound exploration occurs around the nature of personhood, especially in the context of artificial intelligence. The dialogue posits that true personhood entails unpredictability and the capacity for metaphorical interpretation, which should apply to AI as well. Both humans and potential sentient AI are discussed as entities with opaque inner workings, reiterating that attempts to fully control or predict either may be fundamentally misguided. The overarching theme is about grappling with the complexities of emerging intelligences and the inherent unpredictability of both human and artificial agency.
The conversation culminates in reflections on the role of institutions amidst rapid technological advancements and cultural shifts. There's a call for a balanced approach that acknowledges the wisdom embedded within institutions while being critical of their sometimes perverse logics, especially in large corporations. The idea is proposed that viable forms of governance and culture may arise from a new synthesis—drawing from the constructive elements of both anarchical and institutional frameworks. Ultimately, there is hope for developing institutions that nurture human flourishing while respecting the intricacies of our increasingly complex world.
Halfway through one of my favorite sci-fi novels, Charles Stross’ Accelerando, we tune in to the members of an interstellar first contact mission as they pass the time debating whether the Technological Singularity has happened yet. Spoiler alert: all of them are uploaded minds appearing in a consensus VR environment as various post-human avatars, riding inside a computer the size of a grain of rice on a craft the size of a soda can. To readers it seems like a satire: what, if not this, would it take to convince you we’re over the rainbow? But good science fiction provokes us to question the present, and so we must ask: what are we waiting for? Are we still moderns? Is this still Western civilization? Should we be looking forward to the age of machine superintelligence, or has it already happened, like physicist Cosma Shalizi argues in his blog post “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”?
Here’s a clip from that piece:
Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check.Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check.Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check.Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, "the coldest of all cold monsters"? Check; we call them "the self-regulating market system" and "modern bureaucracies”.
Maybe we ought to consider, like Bruno Latour, that We Have Never Been Modern. Or maybe, as Federico Campagna suggests in Prophetic Culture, each era’s inhabitants identify as “modern” and project the “likely story” produced by their process of “worlding” to imagine futures that recede like mirages or rainbows as we approach the horizon of our understanding? By the time we arrive, we have transformed and the mysteries of the ancient and future are conserved. Some Indigenous cultures believe that all animals identify as “people” — perhaps every world is mundane to its native observers, and yet all of them arise out of chaos and ineffability. Science can’t answer some questions because it depends on replicability and provisional consensus, and some questions ultimately force us out of attempts to get everything to make sense and into contemplative surrender to our own cognitive limits (no matter how much we augment ourselves).
Science will, of course, continue. As Ted Chiang wrote twenty five years ago in his short story “Catching Crumbs from The Table”, advancements in AI and biotechnology could foreseeably “[leave] journals to publish second-hand accounts translated into human language… Journals for human audiences were reduced to vehicles of popularization, and poor ones at that, as even the most brilliant humans found themselves puzzled by translations of the latest findings… Some left the field altogether, but those who stayed shifted their attentions away from original research and toward hermeneutics: interpreting the scientific work of metahumans.”
In 2025, living through the superexponential evolution of machine intelligence, this story hits close to home. What will we do when all breakthroughs are made by black box AI systems whose logic and insights evade us? We already have to take large language models on faith, doing our best to conserve a modest sliver of understanding as we resign ourselves to the practical benefits of successful but illegible prediction. But given that scientific progress has largely advanced through the proliferation of hyperspecialist experts who cannot understand one another’s research, we should again ask if it were ever the case that we could explain everything, or whether we’ve just been ignoring the central importance of textual interpretation as we puzzled over the riddles of a world that never owed us any satisfying final answers?
Whether we’re modern or not, it is time for us to reconsider the foundations of ideas like informed consent, agency, evidence, and personhood. Whether you think we’re still waiting around for the future or that we are living it, we live among an ecology of diverse intelligences and require a humbler approach…one strangely similar to that of Medieval serfs and jungle-dwelling foragers than first seems obvious…one that owes back pay to the dismissed disciplines of religion, magic, and myth. Which is why I’m excited to get weird with you in this episode.
This week I speak with one of my closest comrades in philosophical investigation, Canadian author and film-maker J.F. Martel. Co-founder and co-host (with Phil Ford) of the internationally-acclaimed Weird Studies Podcast and Weirdosphere online learning platform, tenured para-academic explorer of high strangeness and the liminal zones between the known, unknown, and unknowable, J.F. is a perfect partner with whom to refine inquiry into persistent and tricky questions like:
– What is the nature of technology and how does it change as our seemingly-discrete tools and built environments merge into a planet-scale thinking machine?
– How can we tell when AI achieves personhood, and what does it take to be “good parents” of beings that are fundamentally beyond our control?
– What can religion and fairy tales teach us about living well in a world where our explanatory frameworks fail us?
– How can we re-think and re-claim healthy institutions to serve human flourishing after the end of history as we know it?
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J.F.’s Links
ReclaimingArt.comWeirdStudies.comWeirdosphere.orgJF on X | Weird Studies Discord & SubRedditReclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice (book)
Project Links
Read the project pitch & planning docDig into the full episode and essay archivesJoin the online commons for Wisdom x Technology on DiscordThe Future Fossils Discord Server abides!Contact me about partnerships, consulting, your life, or other mysteries
Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser0:01:01 - Introduction0:09:32 - Revisiting Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice0:15:12 - What we lose and gain by automating culture0:31:12 - Wendell Berry’s poem “A Timbered Choir”0:36:50 - Transcendental, Machinic, Immanental, Imaginal, and Fractal0:46:21 - Black Box Personhood & AI as A 'Thou’1:00:00 - Is AI Magic?1:06:10 - Fairy Tales, Faith, and Submission after Modernity1:10:27 - Do we still need institutions?1:16:59 - Thanks & Announcements
Back Catalogue
FF 18 - J.F. Martel on Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny AwesomenessFF 71 - J.F. Martel on Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2WS 26 Living in a Glass AgeFF 126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural RealitiesJRS Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AIFF 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The EcstasyFF 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time
Mentioned Media
Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Erik Hoel’s “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture”New York Encounter (event)Art is dead. Long live Art with Android Jones | Mind Meld 323 Third Eye DropsCosma Shalizi & Henry Farrell’s “Artificial Intelligence is a Familiar-Looking Monster”Sigmund Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure PrincipleWendell Berry’s “A Timbered Choir”Henri Corbin’s “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal”William Irwin Thompson’s Imaginary LandscapesDanny Hillis’ “The Enlightenment Is Dead. Long Live The Entanglement”Neri Oxman’s “The Age of Entanglement”David Krakauer’s “Emergent Engineering”Kevin Kelly’s Out of ControlFF 150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-HargensFF 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking BlasphemyTop Aerospace Scientists Suspect UFOs are Biblical Time Machines | Diana Walsh Pasulka on The Danny Jones PodcastZiwei Xu et al.’s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models”Isaac Asimov’s FoundationGilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition
Other Mentions
Donna TartMatt CardinMichael PhilipBenoit MandelbrotJames AllenGregory BatesonDavid HumeGottfried LeibnizL. Ron HubbardErik DavisCarl JungJacques LacanAlbert CamusJean-Paul SartreCurt JaimungalStafford BeerCarl SaganJames HillmanPhil FordMarie-Louise von FranzGK ChestertonEdmund Burke
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