073: wrestling with the ambivalent angels of our future
AI, cyborgs, Donna Haraway, Blade Runner, and a better blasphemy
It started with this one from the NYTimes about how Bing’s chatbot made a pass at a technology reporter (ok buddy, we get it, you’re a married hottie whom even the chatbots want to date), and then this one from the New Yorker which briefly made me think I had a handle on the topic, and this one by Stephen Wolfram which falls into my new favorite category “Maths That I Don’t Understand but Feel Inspired by Anyway”, and about a thousand tweets.
Then, I kept going. This was easy to do because everyone is writing about it: Ryan Broderick of
went at it here and also here. Erik Hoel of wrote this sobering piece, which linked to this petition which is somehow getting less attention than some other petitions that are arguably not at the center of the survival of the human race. John Warner at wrote a follow-up to his magnificent, “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving,” Bloomberg has got three extremely anxious stories like this one up at the same time right now. 1I read so much stuff about AI that I dreamed that my copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach was itself an AI and was talking to me from my nightstand.
The collective opinion is that we are on the cusp of either utopian breakthrough or a global conflagration, but no one is saying very much about what we can do about it, either way. (John Warner is one exception—I’m going to talk about his proposal for teaching writing in a time of AI in a future Substack.) It’s more and more difficult to get anything out of the discourse other than vaguely, Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
For someone like me, this is tantamount to a challenge. I tend to run at the things that make me afraid—anything is better than waiting around and doing nothing. Even if it’s a worst-case scenario, I want to know more about it so I can figure out what to do about it. I want to know HOW can I find more good information, and WHY are we in this state of emergency in the first place, and HOW does the problem or technology or situation work, and WHAT does it look like in different colors, or if you turn it upside down, and WHAT does it sound like if you translate the acronyms or talk about it in pig Latin, or whatever.
Yesterday, in desperation, I texted my friend who knows about AI and asked, “what precisely is going to happen to us?” He replied, “We have no idea what’s going to happen.” At least he’s honest.
∞
I knew that Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto would take me a long way toward what I was looking for, because she started with a defense of blasphemy and irony.
Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play… At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.
There it is, right there in the first paragraph: a willingness to go bravely into the chaotic wilderness for answers. Haraway is saying, “this problem is going to be fucking hard to solve, so we are going to go at it by way of some rhetorical rule-breaking.”
So, now that we have been given some space for “serious play,” and can talk a bit without being labeled as doom-pilled, techno-utopian, or luddite-leaning, or any other limiting label, let’s look at the terrifying convergence of the body and the machine that is the near-advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Haraway, writing as a socialist feminist in 1981, had the prescience to peer into the future of technology and see it as an opportunity to disrupt the capitalist, militarist, colonist, patriarchy.2 For her, the idea of a cyborg—a being with both organic and mechanical parts—was a disruption to heterodoxies that were limiting the cause of radical feminism, heterodoxies that she described as the “totalizing and imperialist feminist dream of a common language.” She was considering how technological progress might affect the structures of labor, economies, and human relationships and seeing opportunities for systemic change.
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways… It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices. Insofar as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras...There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.
She’s saying what if we bring in the machines? Let’s see what happens when a power that is not defined by the one Great White, Judeo-Christian Truth enters the chat group.
Feminists, Haraway goes on to say, could think in terms of code, because to translate the world into a problem of coding means that what was formerly heterogeneous (and, as a result limiting and even oppressive) can be “submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.” This is where the radical leftist feminist meets, for a brief, illuminating moment, the Silicon Valley libertarian.
To the person who might think that translating human experience into zeros and ones is an anathema, that’s the point.
Remember that Haraway is using blasphemy—intentionally speaking profanely about sacred topics. She’s doing rhetorical jujitsu to get people to think differently about social systems. Everything is on the table for Haraway: racial equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, anti-capitalism—she wants a bolder, purer freedom, something that can prevent restrictive paradigms from being reassembled in the same old way, except with less offensive names. She is saying that if we leave behind an “anti-science metaphysics” and take responsibility for the power of science and technology, we have a chance of reconstructing a better society.
Now, before you start pointing to the overwhelmingly white male world of tech in 2023 and all of the social evils it has inflicted on us, as though I am not keenly aware, and as though Haraway’s experiment in blasphemy was misguided, just relax for one second. Remember the point is to run toward the fear and see if maybe we can find some bigger, more interesting solutions.
It’s pretty clear to me that to enact positive change in the nascent era of Artificial General Intelligence, we will need a lot of collaborative effort, discomfort, and indeed tolerance of pain. So, we might as well accept the challenge as it stands and figure out what we can do to save ourselves and our children, because hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and click-baiting are boring. Also, ineffective.
What if we met up for a weekend somewhere in a big house with a view and a wine cellar and had a friendly, difficult, creative, days-long conversation about the ways in which technology has and has not lived up to Haraway’s vision of ushering in an “infidel heteroglossia” in the last forty years? And dreamed up a bunch of things we could do to advance a more pleasurable future? Wouldn’t that be so much fun?
∞
This weekend, I did the only rational thing a person who has overdosed on writings about AI can do: I watched both of the Blade Runner films. It was great; I had forgotten how good the first one is, and the second one was better than I thought it would be. It’s interesting how well science fiction books and films have been at predicting the future (also a bit horrifying—for example, the fact that Noah Baumbach shot part of the adaptation of “White Noise,” which is about a train derailment that creates an airborne toxic event, in East Palestine, Ohio)
But there’s a scene toward the end of “Blade Runner 2049” that I take serious issue with. It’s the one in which the Ryan Gosling character (Agent KD6-3.7 or “Joe” depending on whether you’re speaking for or against the techno-hegemony) has met up with the replicant resistance and is told that “dying for the right cause is the most human thing to do.”
Friends, that is some nihilist bullshit.
It’s not even the message of either of the Blade Runner movies. The message is that surviving for the right cause is the most human thing to do. The message is that daring to stay alive, in spite of all of the dystopian forces that the best minds in Hollywood can imagine to throw at you, is the most human thing to do.
In Hamish McKenzie’s podcast interview with Etgar Keret that came out on Friday they talk about Keret’s father, a Holocaust survivor. From the introduction:
His father crouched in a hole in the ground for more than 600 days to escape the Nazis in Belarus, getting through the time by telling himself stories of a parallel universe in which everything was the same except for one detail (like that there were still Nazis who chased Jews, but when they caught them they would give them sweets)
You know what? This is the most human thing you can do—to survive two years of hiding in a hole in the ground through the power of your own mind. John Steinbeck called this capacity “that glittering instrument, the human soul.”
I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest. ‘
You know what else? We are the owners of the stories, not the large language models—for now. We are the owners of the technology— for now. ChatGPT and Bing/Sydney and all the rest of the generative AIs are locked in the room with us, not the other way around—for now. We have a tiny bit of time left to get our cyborg on and start harnessing the power of human ingenuity, and if you believe in waiting for the government or the corporations to do this on our behalf, then you need to get a better blasphemy.
There is a reason why I am reading about maths that I don’t understand and blanketing my technologist friends with questions about how software works, and delving a bit more deeply into what’s going on in Silicon Valley than just saying that tech bros are a joke, and writing about topics that take me out of my comfortable world of modern British novels featuring plucky independent-minded heroines.
It’s because I want to survive.
I want to do more than survive. I want to wrestle with the ambivalent angel of our shared future and make it give me a blessing.
I want you to do the same:
Haraway again:
It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the super savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
That’s how big the work is, kids.
Now you:
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I can recommend the one by Stephen Wolfram because he’s just giving extremely cogent mathematical information. Ryan Broderick is also worth reading—he’s like you and me, only slightly more internet literate, and is keeping up week, by week. The others are going to give you anxiety, except maybe Ted Chiang at the New Yorker because he’s just doing AI theme park tourism.
This is a very, very basic application of a marvelously complex and interesting 88 page essay. Amongst other things Haraway offers a substantive critique of market economics on the politics of civil rights of the civil rights movement; speaks to the particular double bind of women of color and lesbian women of color inside the “informatics” of white feminism; and describes several approaches to a cyborg manifesto from science fiction including from Octavia Butler and Anne McAffrey.
Fascinating piece—thank you. The NYT piece as freaky! The print edition especially, with that story on the top of the front. Need to jump into the other pieces you found.
Can we meet in the Berkshires with good wine and talk Haraway and the profound differences between nihilism (thank you for calling that) and anarchism, which I've just begun understanding a little more?