Louis Armand: AI R/Evolutions I

This seminar examines the historical evolution of material consciousness & intelligent machines -- from the Industrial Revolution to the so-called Technological Singularity; from the advent of autopoietic machines to the proposition that any system can be entroped to function as a "neural network"; from AI as human prosthesis to AI as the terminal horizon of the "posthuman condition."

The linkage between mass industrialisation, information systems & ecology brings into view the idea of a semiosphere or noosphere, in which local-global structures exhibit "intelligence." Quantum computing, terraformation & cosmology point to ways in which catastrophic systems also produce a mode of "catastrophic intelligence."

Whether or not humanity can "learn" from the anthropocene is no longer the question here, but what the anthropocene can mean for the idea of a general "technology" of non-human & post-human systems, & ultimately the place of humanly-defined "intelligence" within these.

Where machine learning has previously involved a necessary hierarchy of knowledge-power vis-a-vis humans, this seminar examines the ways in which "machines," or systems in general, make manifest a general materiality of "consciousness" communicable as feedback systems. This feedback produces self-modifying behaviour along the entire spectrum of possible "communication," implying that intelligence, too, is evolutionary.