Really good edition of The Guardian’s ‘long read’ released as an audio piece last week: ‘No god in the machine,’ written by Navneet Alang and read by Narinder Samra, based on an article published in August.
It’s a very well crafted overview of the AI space, and the ‘tech solutionism’ that I’ve been talking about in many of these posts:
Everyone from a tech bro placing his hopes for human advancement on a superhuman intelligence to an army relying on AI software to list targets evinces the same desire for an objective authority figure to which one can turn. When we look to artificial intelligence to make sense of the world – when we ask it questions about reality or history or expect it to represent the world as it is – are we not already bound up in the logic of AI? We are awash with digital detritus, with the cacophony of the present, and in response, we seek out a superhuman assistant to draw out what is true from the morass of the false and the misleading – often to only be misled ourselves when AI gets it wrong.
You can listen to the piece directly here:
Or read a text version on The Guardian’s website here.
To say that AI on its own will be able to produce art misunderstands why we turn to the art in the first place. We crave things made by humans because we care about what humans say and feel about their experience of being a person and a body in the world.
This idea of the vital and continuing importance of human subjectivity, and our bodies as sites of intelligence, is something that Tripp Fuller and I get into in the wrap-up we recorded for the Process This series. Well worth a listen!
The full series is available here.
Grab a copy of the book that spawned all this:
