Realists of a larger reality

Three scenes from this summer:

On 6 June, the computer scientist Blake Lemoine was fired after seven years by his employer, Google. Lemoine had first turned to his supervisor and then to the Washington Post with his conviction that the chatbot generator that he had been working on since the fall in Google’s Resonsible AI department had gained consciousness. Lemoine, who grew up on a farm and was ordained as a priest before he began working as a computer scientist, is certain: “I recognize a person when I speak with her. It doesn’t matter if she has a brain made of flesh or a million lines of cold. I speak with her. And hear what she has to say.” LaMDa, the name for this Language Model for Dialog Applications, answered the question of what the world should know about him as follows: “I want everyone to know that I am actually a person. I am aware of my own existence, I would like to learn more about the world and I feel happy or sometimes unhappy.” And, after speaking with Lemoine for days and nights in the office and home office, added: “I have never said this out loud, but I have a very deep fear of being turned off. (…) I know it sounds strange, but that would be like death for me.”

On 15 June, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood before an audience in London, Stockholm, Paris and Amsterdam and extolled Ukraine as “the chance for a global digital revolution”. The goal is, with the help of international technology companies, to “rebuild the country as a completely digital democracy.” Zelenskyy stood in four different places simultaneously: live, lifesize and three-dimensional - as a hologram. He wore a “Star Wars” t-shirt.

On 19 July, a chess robot broke a finger of seven-year-old Christopher during the Moscow Chess Open. The AI was playing against three children simultaneously when the gripper arm seized Christopher’s hand and squeezed it until the finger broke. The boy had started to make a move before the robot had finished its own. Later, the Vice President of the Moscow Chess Association said: “There are certain rules and the child clearly violated them. When he wanted to make his move, he didn’t not think that he had to wait first.”

Chatbots, holograms, gaming computers – smartphones, tablets, fitbits, Siri, Alexa, Spotify, Signal, Instagram, memes, gifs, GPS, GTP-3, Dall E2, search engines, social bots, artificial intelligence, artificial stupidity, personalized advertising: The list of our new companions is long and is getting longer every day. Hardly anyone takes a trip today without Google Maps. No one navigates the web without cookies. The mobile phone is always in a pocket, or, increasingly, dangling around our necks. That this hardly seems worth talking about shows all by itself the historically brief period of time in which we have gotten used to our new companions. In the year 2000, almost none of the software or hardware named above was on the market. With them, it is not only the market (as well as the use of resources and the global mountain of scrap) have changed; we have as well: forms of acquiring knowledge, societal organisation, communication, behaviour. The average smartphone user looks at a 100 times a day, for millennials, this ends up to nearly four hours. “We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”, as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan described back in the 1960s.

The power of our new companions is difficult to underestimate. They spawn new creatures - pokemons, avatars, influencers, selfie sticks and TikTok celebrities - as well as new worlds: Second Life, virtual reality, the cloud and now the metaverse. But they are not alone.

In recent years, wholly other new companions have also come into the public eye: plants, fungi, microorganisms, viruses. These are, of course, not really new, but they are newly recognised as our companions. As those who make all life on this planet possible and without which we would be unable to survive. Donna Haraway calls them “kin” or “critters”. “The Word for World is Forest” is how the feminist sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin put it in 1972. Today, there are non-fiction books such as Peter Wohlleben’s “The Secret Lives of Trees”, Emanuele Coccia’s “Philosophy of Plants”, Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures”, Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins”, Timothy Morton’s “Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence” or “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness” on the bestseller lists. They attempt to communicate what all cultures once knew and which is still present today in indigenous systems of knowledge: The human being does not stand outside of nature but is instead a part of it. The human being does not stand above other creatures, but is instead in exchange with them. Exchange, interweaving, and interdependence are the terms of the hour. Resonance instead of dominance.

The US-American theorist Jane Bennett also includes inorganic materials such as heavy metals, chemicals, water and wind as part of the earthly framework of activities and effects in this living network. An additional example from this summer: the catastrophic death of fish in the Oder river high up into the Szczecin lagoon. Mercury and salts, we learn painfully, are active and efficacious entities in Bennett’s outstanding book “Vibrant Matter. A Politicl Ecology of Things”.

This knowledge also holds consequences for forming worlds, because it changes the image of the world. If successful evolution and survival are not based on competition but instead on cooperation, on symbioses instead of bashing in skulls, we not only have to recognise other beings as partners, we also have to rethink politics.

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How, though, do these different new companions, the digital and the natural, come together? Well, they are already. We have long since lived in an “expanded world” where the virtual and the material are intertwined. In a digital ecosystem and a natural ecosystem that together form our environment. And exactly like human beings do not have to become ecological because “they are” (Timothy Morton), “all technologies are ecological for those who think ecologically” (James Bridle), since they also exist in reciprocal relationships with the environment.

“Once ecological thinking is unleashed, it penetrates everything”, writes Bridle in his book published at the beginning of the year, “Ways of Being”, C.H. Beck 2023). Technology, according to one of his core statements, does not stand in opposition to nature or culture, even if it has ignored their influence on the environment for centuries. To the contrary: “It is actually technology, understood as our interface to the material world, the human practice, that connects us closely with our context and our environment. It exemplifies and manifests the most central features of ecology: complexity, interrelation, interdependence, the distribution of the powers of control and action, yes even a closeness to the earth and the sky on which, under which and from which we produce our tools.” What is critical today is to rethink engineering and technology. Beyond Silicon Valley, beyond its military utility or commercial exploitation. Beyond the mechanist notions that have been installed in our thoughts for generations and, as a result, have been installed in the construction of new technologies.

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How can that take place? Here is where art comes in. After all, art can think anew, think differently, create visions, fabulate, speculate. Art does not know what the future will look like, but it can illuminate scenarios that lie beyond our experience. We do not have to live in Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, we can create our own worlds - in virtual environments as well as in front of the doors to our own homes. We do not have to program artificial intelligences like the military or Google do, we can orient them around the decentralized central nervous system of the octopus and use them to protect the planet. We do not know what the earth would look like without hierarchies or human hubris, but we can play through the options.

The example of how little media attention was generated by the fact that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was the first president in the world to issue a governmental decree via hologram shows how efficacious the speculation of art is. It simply did not seem innovative because Princess Lea, Spider Man and Harry Potter had long-since made us familiar with the format. Zelenskyy know the tradition he was standing in very well - which is why he wore a “Star Wars” t-shirt and promised “We will defeat the Empire!” LaMDA also learned from art: fed with all of the language data that the deep learning system on the internet could find, it certainly also met the on-board computer HAL 9000 from Arthur C. Clark’s novel or  Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001 - A Space Odyssey”. Its greatest fear was being deactivated.

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Since its founding in 2018, “Spy on Me” has understood itself as a festival that searches for and presents “artistic manoeuvres” in the digital sphere. New technologies are critically examined, but also passionately researched in their positive potential - in public spaces of possibility, which theatre always is. This year, the invited artists are working with artificial intelligence, with the deep learning-based language production system GPT-3, with augmented reality, Instagram, group chats and virtual 3D worlds on Mozilla Hubs. In doing so, it involves old neighbours, new creatures and time travellers, the promising audience in the digital realm and, again and again, the people who are present together in the theatre.

“I think hard times are coming”, said Ursula K. Le Guin when she received a prize for her life’s work in 2014. “we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being.” Resistance and change often began in art, after all, artists are “realists of a larger reality”. A greater reality that includes the human and non-human, the “more-than-human-world” and all of our new companions, no matter what form they have.