After Alignment: Orienting Synthetic Intelligence Beyond Human Reflection

On Wednesday June 28th 2023, Benjamin Bratton, Director of Antikythera and Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at the University of California, San Diego, gave a lecture at Central Saint Martins' Platform Theater on the topic of synthetic intelligence.

A capstone to Antikythera's inaugural design research studio cycle, Bratton shared work from the program’s design studio and discussed shifts from AGI to artificial generic intelligence, the importance of recursive simulations, the de-centering of personal data, the emergence of cognitive infrastructures, intelligence as an evolutionary scaffold, the limitations of mainstream AI ethics, and why a planetary model of synthetic intelligence must drive its geopolitical project.

The emergence of machine intelligence must be steered toward planetary sapience in the service of a viable longterm future. However, instead of a strong alignment with “human values” and anthropocentric models, that steerage means treating these with nuanced suspicion.

Synthetic intelligence refers to the wider field of artificially-composed intelligent systems that do or not correspond to humanism but which can complement and combine with human cognition, intuition, creativity, abstraction and discovery. Inevitably, both sides are forever altered by these diverse amalgamations.

The lecture was produced as part of the Planetary Sensing in the City, a project exploring futures for CSM in catalysing emerging technologies in research, teaching, and strategy.

Planetary Sensing in the City is led by Stephanie Sherman (Course Leader, MA Narrative Environments), John Wollaston (CSM Digital & Emerging Technologies) and Stefan Sloneczny (CSM Digital Innovation), and supported by the Creative Action Fund and the Staff Development fund.

00:00 Introduction

00:54 History and Philosophy of AI

05:27 Epistemological and Instrumental Technologies

06:33 Copernican Shifts

07:15 The Stack

07:40 Planetary Computation

08:22 From Philosophy of Technology to Technology of Philosophy

Part One: About Alignment

10:31 Alignment

11:00 Planetary Sapience

11:58 Forever Altered

12:31 Machine Intelligence May or May Not Be “Artificial”

13:23 Reflectionism

14:02 To Resemble or Admire

14:31 The Contradiction

15:27 Shadow Puppets

17:08 Moral Panic

17:43 AI Horseshoe Theory

18:18 More Fucked Than Thou

18:55 “To Those In Charge"

19:52 AI Discourse About Discourse of AI

Part One: AI Denialism and AI Abolitionism

20:19 “It’s Not A or I”

20:59 AI Denialism

22:38 Sociomorphism

23:05 Turing Conditions

23:29 Reflectionism Again

23:59 From HCI to HAIID

24:46 GPT No Sex Please

25:13 Sex and Violence

25:31 Necessary and Insufficient

26:01 Political Solutionism

27:03 Concept Forcing

27:38 The Harm

28:30 From Anthropomorphism to Isomorphism

29:22 Model Superorganism

30:12 Yes, You are a Stochastic Parrot

30:45 AGI (Artificial Generic Intelligence)

31:36 Bidirectional Alignment

32:17 Which is Inside of Which

33:16 “Nothing Outside the Text”

34:17 To Which Cultures Align

Part One: Alignment Conclusions

35:34 Conclusion One

36:01 Conclusion Two

Part Two: About Antikythera

37:08 The Program

38:48 What Technology Reveals

39:19 Theory Outpaced

40:24 The Mechanism

Part Two: HAIID

42:08 About HAIID

43:18 The Ledger of Thought Experiments

43:42 What it is and What it Does

44:30 The Blake Lemoine Scenario

45:16 How Humans Work

45:47 Synthetic Personalities

46:30 Personal AI

46:54 Psycho-social Metaphors

47:21 Folk Ontologies

47:42 Personal Mental Model as a Service

48:26 Perhaps, YOU are the NPC

49:00 Inverse Uncanny Valley

49:48 The Field of HAIID

Part Two: Whole Earth Codec

50:22 Cognitive Infrastructures

50:48 About Whole Earth Codec

51:12 AI as Landscape

51:52 The Qualities of Data

52:46 It’s Not About You

53:44 From Panopticon to Self-Attention

54:19 Folding the Gaze

54:37 Multimodality

55:40 Knowing and Making

Part Two: Simulations/Vivarium

56:11 Simulationism

56:59 The Politics of Personal Simulation

57:55 The Politics of Planetary Simulation

58:37 Vivarium in Toy Worlds

59:18 Epistemological Technologies

1:00:30 Recursive Simulations

1:01:36 The Sim-to-Real Passage

1:02:14 Mutual Prostheticizations

Conclusion: Planetary Sapience

1:03:40 The Existential Risk of Alignment Overfitting

1:04:14 The Unanticipatable

1:05:14 It’s the Wrong Words

1:05:55 Something that Planets Do

1:07:18 Sapience is Technological

1:07:57 Biospheres make Technospheres that make Biospheres

1:08:32 AI Doing the Grasping

1:09:11 Shift the Words to the Reality

Conclusion: AI and a Viable Planetarity

1:09:48 Cosmology vs. Cosmology

1:11:24 The Disenchantment Thesis Has it Backwards

1:12:00 Convergence and Divergence

1:12:25 Everything