2 THE ONTOLOGICAL ENTANGEMENT OF THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMANS Artificial intelligence has become a common technological development that has introduced its potential in computing big data . It as an infrastructure is seen as a subservient form of intelligence made by the humans for the humans. Our relationship with this form of intelligence, while many think will lead to AI dominating and then eventual extinction of the human species,the various thinkers argue to put across a new perspective in relation to this matter. Their objective is to insist that we need to assess our perceptions and faults in our thinking of the existence of AI. Luciana Parisi lays down key moments in the history of mankind when cybernetics as a tool took birth and evolved into systems .¹”The period from the 1940s to the 1960s, involving the rise of the cybernetic infrastructure of communication and the introduction of computational logic into decision-making procedures; second, the 1970s and 1980s, which saw a shift towards interactive algorithms and expert and knowledge systems; and third, from the post-80s to the post-2000s, which were characterized by a focus on intelligent agents, machine-learning algorithms, and big-data logic”. (parisi, 2015)This timeline helps one understand the evolution of machine learning and how it has started building and impacting the physical world, so much so that Benjamin H Barton argues that we constantly want this synthetic form of intelligence to be human-like. He persuades his argument by stating that we need to understand if AI knows what it means to be human and the potential danger that it carries to humans is even understood by it in the first place. He tries to enforce that AI is a form of intelligence in itself ,cannot be and should not be made to constantly prove itself to be human-like in order to prove its capabilities as an intelligence . He then goes on to make us understand how our societal beliefs and self centeredness prohibits the understanding of AI.² The Turing test asks the computer and a participant to pass itself as a human and if it could prove itself to be a human or any specific gender, it passes the test of intelligence. (barton, 2015)
Figure 7 | Human like AI ; Ex- Machina
12
This obsession for AI to have human mentality or our precise definitions of what is to be a human has been also imposed on our species as well where colour, racism and gender inequality are some of the few problems arising from societal beliefs. Patricia reeds then helps us understand how these societal beliefs are also shaping up the AI and its definition to read what is to be human. She points out how computing data has whiteness as the index of being human. ³This forces the AI to look past all the various differences in us as a species and starts establishing a brutal logic that acts as a decision made by the AI about the data it gathers (parisi, 2015). ³This ubiquitous computing, where our every conduct with a technology is computed to generate behavioral models also will start making AI understand how humans think. It is of importance to also know and understand how algorithms learn and think among themselves. (Barton,2015)
13
