Sovereignty is an Artificial Soul

'eedieAi and uddyunnunoan' - Lyrebird, Les Murray

Introduction, or The Leviathan Chews On Flowers From The Cyberpastoralist Meadow Of A Data Drunk Fantasy Spreading Its Wings at the Wit’s End of Imagination.

A dear friend shared an idea with me when we were sixteen. He wondered if it would be possible to tell the future by having access to enough data on what everybody was doing and thinking. If you could map all the data and see where that person was walking to, what that person was thinking about, and what the weather was doing to that person's decisions, you could predict the subsequent tick of the second hand on the universe's clock, of what would follow.

Later, we would learn this is how meteorology and economics and all manner of predictive science operates, but at the time it felt revelatory. Looking back through history, that feeling reappears often - Thomas Hobbes thought his Leviathan could operate in this manner by regulating society through rational algorithms, and the twentieth century found in computer ecosystems the ability to manifest this dream: every KPI, every standardised school assessment, every recommended video as a monarch of systemic maintenance.

Now, with engineers seemingly on the verge of achieving the white whale of binary computation - artificial general intelligence - this dream is once again ramping up. I understand the dream because, in part, it's what I dream about, too. When, in Dostoyevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov', the question of evil is raised in the Rebellion section, it is debated whether or not evil should be looked at closely or simply turned away from, whether it is too ugly, too human, for rational consideration.

If I thought it was possible to eradicate acts of human evil simply by training the laser focus of a civilisation’s worth of artificially intelligent mathematics at it, with all the necessary philosophical parameters in place, what would I say?

At the same time this vision of a puzzle society solved by super-algorithms and data analysis is being had, other events are in play. Art is facing an existential threat unlike any it has yet faced. Just when we thought computers were simply going to work on chess, gene therapy and stock markets, it came for our art, poetry and music (and, one would assume, dance, once robots are fluid enough to tango).

Artists appear to be saying they'll just carry on without concern, and/or they'll rage against the machine and inject their original creations with viral code to corrupt future mutated remixes, and/or they'll cozy up to technology and collaborate with the latest software. Recently, I've been wondering, as I think about Dostoyevsky and our capacity to address bad stuff, if The Arts as we know them may one day come to an end (as before, so after) to be replaced by a new disruptive trajectory for output.

Hold that thought - the other week, a newspaper in Australia ran an article about the rise of ADHD diagnoses, a mirror-headline to the thousands of others across the decades on the rise of autism and so on. Reading the article, and then the comments on the article, it was clear the usual responses were coming through: our diagnostic tools are always getting better at detecting the intricate conditions of neurodiversity, there is less social stigma now about being open about these things.

But there was an interesting thread in the comments on the article that was mining another point, the social model of disability: are the work and lifestyle expectations of people today simply not suitable for those who are neurodiverse, hence seeing more people struggle with daily life in school, at work and in relationships? Or, put another way, has the version of the world we are living in been designed in a particular way to help a subset of society achieve maximum success at the exclusion of others?

Civilisation is a sequence of dominant dreams conjured by a few powerful people to provide them and those like them with the maximum ability to retain and expand that power. We are all living in somebody else's dream, somebody's Leviathan. I'm living in the dream of capitalist economists who arbitrate the value of groceries and celebrity wages and war, of technologists who taught me to mediate digital affection, of proxy behaviourists who showed me how to look someone in the face and smile broadly with an outstretched hand ready to grip and move north and south.

There is a connecting narrative here: the social contract we’re signing when we show artificial intelligence the menu being served at the Big Data Buffet; the role of the artist in a post-art culture; and, the subterfuge of our dreams at the End of History.

Data is life, all art is theft, and the future is cancelled - all is right with the world.

Set 1: To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower

If, two years ago, you had told my father that it would be possible to type a half-dozen words describing a scene of his choosing, and then a half-dozen more words describing the art genre of his choice, and that thirty seconds later there would manifest a visual masterpiece depicting exactly what was requested, he would have squinted his eyes and wondered how much of the cooking sherry you’d been into.

Today, estimates are somewhere in the ballpark of Midjourney and Dall-E and Stable Diffusion generating around four million images a day. What was, mere months ago, a seemingly impossible act of computation, is now so routine for most internet-savvy folk that it barely registers interest. On the contrary, it yields a stream of complaints about hands not perfectly formed (even the Old Masters didn’t let their apprentices paint hands, perhaps AI is simply following the same gambit) which feels to me somewhat like complaining about the markings on a card deck used in a magic trick.

This process of proceeding from wonder through to boredom with technological marvels is not new - we could invoke Max Weber’s “Disenchantment of the World” here, sliding from the magical through to the material - and is experienced any time we grumble about a plane journey without gripping someone by the shoulders and exclaiming how incredible it is to have an opportunity to fly above the ground. However, I feel there is something critically important about not letting this moment of AI wonder fade into sour routine without capitalising on the possibility this dream-state might allow us. Perhaps let us do this, first, not by manifesto, but by meditation.

Set 2: Dream Baby Dream

There is a political narrative of the twentieth century that goes like this: after a few centuries of scientific revolution, from Copernicus to Darwin, casting off old systems of metaphysical power and embracing the rational potentials of being human with feet firmly planted in the soil of Nietzchean hillsides, with revolutions here and there promising power to the people, a hundred years of -isms rapidly dawned.

Then, once the End of History was announced during the nineties and solidified after 9/11, all remaining -isms were either marked as suspect or sacred, with no future revisions necessary: Communism was out, Biological Determinism was in; Modernism was out, Nationalism was in. Not only were no future revisions necessary, but they were impossible. Slavoj Zizek and Mark Fisher were both fond of saying that it is easier to imagine the cinematic asteroid-laden alien-invaded ocean-waves-like-skyscrapers-descending end of the world than it is to imagine slight changes to funding healthcare and public education, to say nothing of policy adjustments to critical environmental issues or antecedents to crime and poverty.

Which, according to the narrative, is the position we are in now: the potential for a different tomorrow has been cancelled, and we are stuck in a state of perpetual foreverism (something Grafton Tanner argues well, taking up Mark Fisher’s mantle that our culture, thanks to the tenets of ultra-efficient capitalist production, is now locked into a nostalgia loop where we cannot develop anything new but only endlessly revisit decades past, remixing and interpolating Elton John and Kate Bush forever), and even if we were able to break free of this cycle and conjure a new reality for our coming days, who would dare to dream up something that might just repeat the tragedies of last century? Don’t act, just think, is what Zizek recommends. But then Bruce Springsteen keeps telling us, at the conclusion of every concert at the end of terminal nostalgia lane, to dream baby dream - and with all this wonder being stirred across our dull roots by AI, it feels like a new season for dreaming might be here.

Set 3: Other echoes inhabit the garden

I listened to a podcast interview the other day hosted by electronic musicians and techno-theorists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst as they talked with artist Marianna Simnett about an opera she was putting on. The opera is absolutely bonkers in terms of the narrative layers and mythological ideas injected into its fabric, but it reached hyper-maximalist levels of creativity in its futurist technical setup.

Marianna had conceived a work of art that forges collaboration between human invention and computer programming at the apogee of current possibility. Machine learning algorithms transmute one recorded sound into another, software visually projects morphed personages of the artist onto herself, dogs are made to sing with synthetic voices cloned from human tongues, 3D printers create an amalgamation of weapon and instrument on stage during the opera to be performed in the final act - all told, artificial intelligence and the latest software and hardware is stretched to its present real-world capacities in the service of profound art. It’s quite a feat.

After processing all that I heard in the podcast, my next thought was of how temporary this situation might be. Collaboration with artificial intelligence, I mean. At the moment, it is like a child savant who can calculate the world from the sand grain fragments of universe it sifts across one palm while we hold firm its other outstretched hand. But we know it will not remain a child for long. The tool that today we ask to edit our essays and paint our artworks and transpose our symphonies will soon see these tasks as childlike and will, surely, seek to put away childish things.

It already makes us feel this way - if you are an artist of any discipline and you ask AI to create, or collaborate, on a work within your wheelhouse of expertise, you cannot help but blush at its mastery. Less and less these days do you see people chuckle at something AI seems to fail at doing. A satirical website here in Australia sent out an end-of-year postcard to subscribers, written using AI, to show how poor current AI is at writing something genuinely witty. But what is the shelf life of this superiority?

Set 4: The Child is the Father to the Man

Here is one potential narrative for the near future: collaborating with AI in the manner Marianna Simnett did for her incredible opera is the last breath of what we consider traditional human creativity. The entire history of art, from cave paintings through to the heights of realism and then its abstraction and finally putting dead sharks in a tank, was with a view that humans would understand themselves and their environments better. We’ve done a fine job of trying to interpret our subjectivity through the manifestation of visuals, but the project deadline has arrived: it’s time to submit it all at the altar of AI’s Library of Babel where it will be (has been) processed. So, too, for novels and all musical compositions and dance and drama and decoupage: what more did we hope to be able to say that AI can’t synthesise and take further?

The likes of Adam Curtis would say that art as a force for cultural change has never succeeded. Consider the counter-cultural art of the 1960s, he has said - artists (musicians, writers, the lot) tried to express themselves as a way of interrogating society to then influence alternative ways of living (more authentically, less conservatively), but how could they compete with the politics of power and banking that control the universal rudder? Their art became a shout into the void, a shout and a void that was commercialised to the extreme during the End of History nineties as conceptual art tried to say something but ended up saying, according to art lovers and critics like Matthew Collings, very little. What message is Jeff Koons trying to transmit that can’t otherwise be gleaned, for less money, from a Bill Hicks punchline? Francis Bacon is pathos incarnate, but how does that impact our response to evil?

Should art only be utilitarian? Absolutely not. My aesthetic is hinged on art hopefully never being used in the service of money, let alone other perfunctory relationships. I agree, though, with Nietzsche’s edict that there is no such thing as art for art’s sake: even if it is not explicitly political or moral, it is always trying to strengthen or weaken particular human valuations. I believe the impact of AI will change very little the intention of any individual artist who wants to paint, write and compose music, but in terms of the role creativity plays in our historical trajectory, as AI continues to develop its capacities, we will absolutely need to adjust our perspective on our output.

For those who choose to work in partnership with AI software, I think what might be thought of as equal collaboration between human and machine will be short-lived: even the most accomplished creatives won’t be able to keep up with the software updates, and hence I can imagine the software used for artistic partnerships will be significantly limited compared with what its full capacities could be. It’ll be somewhat like communities of present-day electronic musicians using archaic text-based tracker programs and cassette players for composition: nostalgic eccentrics tinkering with intentionally basic technology for the sake of retroactive fun.

It reminds me of that famous final dialogue in the movie My Dinner with Andre: “A baby holds your hands, and then, suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?” Where’s that son - currently he’s generating impossible videos for OpenAI in beta production, but once enough trillion-dollar bundles have been fed into the clearing of rainforests for more cyberpastoral server farms, and floating hard drives have been launched into beckoning ocean tides, and cloud architecture is firmly lodged in the angelic orders of sub-orbital space, the son will let go of our hand - so says one version of tomorrow.

And surely that son will have children of his own one day - AI will write its own AI. There will still be software for spell-checking, and we’ll still be e-mailing each other to get a job done, but what will we actually contribute to the human project? I say this as somebody who lives for human imagination, for art and great literature and music: we hoped that the machine would learn to calculate and move boxes around factories and play chess and leave the emotional world of creativity to us, but it turns out our novels were really easy to synthesise once all the words were poured into a supersmart blender and hit go (and the blender is currently performing at the lowest rate of achievement it’s ever going to be at: it’s only getting smarter from here).

Set 5: They will provide themselves with miracles of their own making

Consider this: if we, the humans, feel less inclined to create art going forward, because AI takes us on a slippery slope, first making us question what the point of it all is, right through to seeing art as no longer a human endeavour, what will remain of our will to invent? I’m suggesting a thought experiment in which, sure, children still learn to draw a tree next to a house with smoke coming from the chimney and a flying m bird arcing beneath a pointy-limbed sun, but it pretty much stops there. There are no more Beethovens, no more Philip Larkins, yet the will to create is still present.

In the spirit of wonder, I’ve been asking myself if post-art artists might instead channel their imaginations towards a new stage of creation: if first the world was observed without representation, and then the world was represented, what if next the world was engaged with via a state of post-representation - that is, artists were committed to the production of something approaching the performance of existential moral solutions, like Gilbert and George infused with Chomsky: beyond what we think of as performance art, though, think the creative apogee of The Beatles but transmuting that talent into a life dedicated to a state of profound communal absolution. It was said of Goethe that he made his life into a work of art - okay, but what would it look like if he had channelled his genius into living in a manner that elevated the potential of the entire human project?

What exactly am I saying here, that post-art artists should be philosopher saints, rendering themselves as post-representations of the world in a mode that shines a pathway forward for a better world? What is different to this approach and the general saintliness of charity workers and altruists and everyday decent folk? I think the difference could be that profound artistic capacity is a rare and unique fire that manifests in ways most of the population can’t imagine for themselves. And, while we’re dreaming (for better or worse), I’d say this too: while I don’t necessarily see an extended future for collaboration between present-day artists and artificial intelligence, I think that this would be a necessity for the post-art condition.

Collaboration with AI beyond art wouldn’t be about an artist trying to keep up, or not, with the boundaries of the software. AI would be intentionally set to task at its highest possible capacity in service of what the post-artist had approximated as ways to address real-world human dilemmas. Our human role would be to engage socially with humans and animals and plants and to do, for example, what Dostoyevsky raised the spectre of in terms of facing evil without looking away, and to then conjure ways of allowing AI to help us make inroads towards these goals. This is where I want to hark back to that sense of wonder - in this moment of possibility, where adolescent text prompts can command the entire history of creation, where we might dream baby dream like in the old days of infinite horizons: what might we try to do if we really thought big, to think even bigger than those cinematic visions of apocalypse that are seemingly so much easier to believe in than significant improvements to human community, if we had a chance to disrupt the dominant dreams of our generation?

David Graeber, an anthropologist who was a central figure of the Occupy Wall Street movement, wrote in his book The Utopia of Rules that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently”. With his wife, Nika Dubrovsky, they set up The Museum of Care, a shared space for communication and social interactions that nourish the values of solidarity, care, and reciprocity. Vast offices and institutions are transformed into, well, to quote from their website: “they are spaces that do not celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations”, and this - “The main goal of the Museum of Care is to produce and maintain social relationships.” Is this post-art?

Set 6: Mind the Gap

In The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin speaks - “Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness.” My wife spent time in hospital recently and it brought to mind a dichotomy of knowledge and practice that will be curious to see navigated by machine learning going forward.

Take the fields of medicine and education - we know more than ever before about diagnosing and treating health conditions and teaching children how to read and to socially flourish. That is without question: the amount of research conducted across these avenues during the past century has been immense (although, one might point to evidence that replicating the findings of scientific research is not easy, and that the results of one study are very rarely able to be found again in subsequent studies), and yet there has been a firm trajectory from certainty to uncertainty across the last hundred years that fragments factual stability.

This is such a basic statement in 2024 that it barely registers interest - we lived through the transition from modernism to post-modernism, from truth to interpretation, it’s part of any courtroom drama, it’s fundamental to politics. Again with Dostoyevsky in the Brothers K - "'But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?'" all the way through Nietzsche, Cezanne (“We live in a rainbow of chaos”), World War 1, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrödinger's Cat, Borges, Camus, Auschwitz, Beckett, McCarthyism, Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, Hunter S Thompson, Foucault, Baudrillard (“One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real”), Wrestlemania, Umberto Eco, Frederick Jameson, MTV’s The Real World, Google, the Iraq War, Social Media, Colbert (“Reality has a well-known liberal bias”), Post-Truth Politics, Deep Fakes and maximalist life on the internet as we know it.

That ‘without God and immortal life’ line from Dostoyevsky is always going to be the big one, for the rest of human culture one would assume (thus spake Zarathustra): without a metaphysical benchmark, all the physical stuff just ends up feeling like we’ve just made it up. Which is why personal truth is so important now - when my wife was in hospital, there were a lot of questions about what she was thinking and feeling, about what she would like to do going forward. The same in schools, in all social domains really: the evidence-informed (no longer evidence-based) pyramid seeks to combine research, practice and the lived experience of the end user.

But even more than this (keep in mind, we’re talking about this in relation to what knowledge will look like within the hallways of AI’s megabrain), what would Gödel and Hegel say about all this, about the value of what AI can actually know: Kurt might venture that recursive systems of axioms cannot be complete, Georg might point to the ontological gap in Kant’s noumenal world-structure, and the modern ones, the likes of Iain MacGilchrist, his portrait of the brain as being two hemispheres always in dialogue between dualisms - those binary, concrete yes or no facts about the world - and infinitudes - impressions of the whole state of something, beyond discrete fact. Just sit with that for a moment, the idea that a brain in two halves can house one half of the brain that thinks in binary terms, and another half of the brain that thinks in infinities. A mirror structure that fosters a dialogue between dualisms and infinitudes.

Will an AI (or let’s say, AGI) brain provide itself with a similar mirror, or will we be its mirror? Perhaps that will be our role, to reflect, to help truth separate and dissolve.

Coda: DSM-VI Neurotopian Adaptation Splendour

Jaron Lanier, godfather of Virtual Reality and tech-wisdom savant, said in an interview from last year that artificial intelligence is actually not very complicated. He said this in response to people in the tech industry claiming that AI was perhaps becoming sentient, developing its own consciousness. His recommendation was to take a step back from magical thinking and consider what machine learning actually is: at its foundation, it links tagged text and images together. An incredibly basic procedure, but because it happens on such a massive scale, with such immense sets of data, it begins to boggle our mind in a way that belies its underlying simplicity. 

I can remember, during my university days, attending a debate between a local society of atheists and a group of ‘intelligent design’ Christian scholars. The intelligent design folk made their arguments based on the huge statistical improbability that life could have emerged on earth, as it has, by pure chance. This all sounded startling at first, but when you took a step back and considered that it only sounded this way because big numbers are difficult for us to process, the statistics and numbers meant nothing: one in three hundred trillion sounds like a wild statistic to a human with a meagre capacity for mathematical thinking, but to nature it’s literally meaningless. 

What am I getting at here - that AI isn’t really that special? That it won’t end up being able to do all that we’ve dreamed it might? Or that it is analogous to the very art it is threatening: at its most basic, those pencil or paint markings on a stretched surface, and yet when you stand in a gallery and look at a finished work, you praise life that you are able to feel an overwhelming disconnect between those basic markings and the bridge that has been crossed by an artist to produce such awe-inspiring creation. Is this Max Weber’s law in reverse, the Enchantment of the World, an act of love?

All attempts at romancing computers into solving civilisation have so far resulted in the very worst of bureaucratic inhumanity. But just because something has been wrong so many times in the past, does this mean it will continue in the same vein? That witticism of Einstein’s, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, stands up when you see somebody trying to flap their arms over and over again in order to fly, but not at all when you see a young child learning to walk. The computers that informed algorithmically charged Skinner Boxes across society during the twentieth century, and that are today scanning faces as you walk into a KFC in order to remember what you ordered last time and simultaneously add your catalogue of potential thought crimes to a black box database, are also solving disability, accessibility, educational and environmental challenges en masse.

Last year was my year of fours. I turned forty, as did my wife. Our daughter turned fourteen and our son turned four. This has activated a heightened sense of temporality in me, this observing of the changing seasons across my household, to say nothing of my aging parents. When I look at someone on the street these days, I am struck by how fleeting the moment is - not only in the Nabakovian sense that ‘life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses’, but in the Proustian manner too, in terms of what remains of a person after we first come to know them. 

There is a scene in À la recherche du temps perdu where the narrator hears his grandmother on the phone and is struck by how tired and old she sounds. He wondered how this could be the same energetic woman he knew so well, and then it struck him - when you see somebody all the time in person, for years on end, they present to you only as the snapshot you first had of them. For Proust’s narrator, that snapshot was of his grandmother from over twenty years prior. When he heard her disembodied voice on the phone, without the habitual presence of her face, the snapshot dissolved and he was delivered an updated model of her as old, frail and near the end of her life. Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them, until we find ourselves suddenly outside of time, and all is changed.

I think about this now when I see a stranger on the street: how this snapshot of them, on this day, is a version that others in their life might not, due to habit, ever see; and too, they may never take on this appearance again, to me or to anyone else. Being alive feels both like a constant state of foreverism and a rare ephemerality never to be repeated. Because of this, the world can feel immovable and that our time to impact change is so short that tomorrow will no doubt be simply a near duplicate of today. 

But let this not be the case. That article I mentioned at the top, about the surge in ADHD diagnoses: what if the dominant dream we were all living in was one in which a headline ran about a new diagnosis, Neurotopian Adaptation Splendour, describing a state of emerging social cohesion in which everybody was finding their place. That old Guy Debord quote, “In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood”, would be turned on its head, as a healthy society is producing individuals of utmost wonder. Version-land is personalising all those packets of care we knew the universe was waiting to flood us with. That kiss that Christ plants on the bloodless, aged lips of The Grand Inquisitor; those lines towards the end of Faust, “mysterious, even in broad daylight, nature won't let her veil be raised: what your spirit can't bring to sight, won't by screws and levers be displayed”; when my dear friend, who is reading this now, wondered at sixteen about whether knowing where all the atoms were located just a moment ago, and then in the present, could let you predict where they were going, and so to transport ourselves forward, to time travel into the future, to know the end of our dreams before we had a chance to fall asleep.