intelligence
(artificial, real)
With bits from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, James Gleick’s Chaos, Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack, and references to Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on human behavioural biology, and Serial Experiments Lain.
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Intelligence is a tricky topic to address. We all try to be, it’s sticky reach permeates into every realm of being, and yet we (a collective species) aren’t anywhere close to quantifying it.
Intelligence is a quagmire of abstracts - of emotion, of what causes reactions and how they can affect other actions; of ability to perceive, do and replicate; of scientific inquiry into the world surrounding us; of understanding the role of variables in any system that makes the world go round; of acceptance that sometimes, things and systems in the world are subject of circumstance, but that it is in the collective best interest to strive for better; and finally of logic, that the social contract humanity is born into demands of it a certain level of functioning to be considered as useful to the collective.


It is a heavily weaponised term, used time and time again to demarcate strongly those who are fit to make decisions and those who must be governed, to separate masses from one another. Intelligence creates divisions among a species based on perceived differences, without actual fact backing up these decisions. Fuelled by human arrogance, it establishes itself as normal within systems of power and causes irreparable harm to multitudes without said power. Then fuelled by remorse and regret, it changes the status quo and sets about trying to fix things and make reparations for actions it had once caused. Objectively, intelligence is not an intelligently defined concept, with most sources defining it as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It is hardly smart, with intellect being capable of both great goods and greater evils. Humanity - you, me, them, he, she, it, all the personal pronouns combined into one unit, humanity exists under an omnipresent omnipotent yardstick of this non-Newtonian concept of intelligence. At times definite characteristics that make one intelligent, at times an ether of varied attributes that could contribute to one having intelligence. It comes as no surprise then, that intelligence, or whatever makes intelligence intelligent is whatever feels right in the moment where right, as positive of connotation it might carry is wholly dependent on the context of the morals being used to justify it, thus leading us right back to the beginning of the argument - that intelligence has no objective meaning, and has been in this state of flux ever since humans decided to confer upon this abstraction of excellence a term that would allow it to serve as a measure for any other abstractions that needed measuring. Is intelligence then a circle - it is a fixed concept of uncertainty that quantifies the idea of being best, or is it a horseshoe - go too far being non-intelligent, and it is intelligent once again? 


Perhaps the greater question is why the human collective needs things to be intelligent, to be smart, and be driven by this unmatched animalistic instinct to become a being capable of more than what can be achieved through its own limited physical and mental capacities. On a planet with over eight million estimated life forms, of which only mere million are known, it seems ridiculous that human intelligence is placed at the very top of an implicit hierarchy of intellect and capability. Given that anything alive today would have had to adapt to years of evolutionary struggle and its consequential survival, it seems amiss to cast aside the intelligence of other forms, and yet human intelligence remains the metric by which the intelligence of all other forms are measured. What then of machines deemed as intelligent, more specifically that of technologies created with the specific purpose of outperforming human limits - does its existence relegate humanity to second in the intellect hierarchy, or does it cause humanity to transcend the limits of the hierarchy itself?


Evolution and collectives.We, you, me, us, and them.
If we were to liken a human to a simplistic animal - a creature capable of thought, of concerns that drives it to action, and with an overarching need to survive whatever current predicament it finds itself in. This train of thought for starters would be really reductionist, we are a complex being with wants and desires. Two, it would put a lot of what we do to survive each day into context. And three, it raises the question of why we think of ourselves as a superior life form and what this means for technologies, specifically the intelligent kind wehave created, the same we currently live in fear of.

If human (or animal, we are basically the same creature apart from the intelligence issue) evolution simplified is essentially us trying to make more of ourselves, looking out for others we determine to be of our kind, and in a way marking ourboundaries and identifiers through the use of skills acquired and applied (there is obviously a lot of us and them going on since time immemorial), us categorising things into little classes of definable characteristics is just an unfortunate by-product of all that cognitive development and that intrinsic need to survive, it comes as no surprise that all we see are boundaries separating everything (Sapolsky, 2011).

What then of the technologies we have developed to help us maintain a perceived and assumed status quo - i. e., tools that let us enforce this deep-rooted need to defend. A sharp stone edge, a blade, a spear, not enough, too ineffective. Metals, better, sharp, fatal, ground down and in the right combination they explode, but weare still in danger of being struck as well. Gases, better, we are safe if the wind blows in our favour, but we have seen how the chemicals affect the body, we have heard first-hand accounts of the horrid reality of battlefields the world over, there was a massive bomb that caused people to melt away, and now we feel bad about the number of people that have died over the years.

We feel bad about having to fight these wars, we do not even know why we are fighting anymore - there exists terms - freedom, peace, retribution, reconciliation, but what are we fighting for, and whose wars are we even fighting? We feel bad, but we still need security from outside forces. We do not know what is out there, but wehave been told they want to drastically alter our way of living, so we must fight it, but fighting isn’t right (when we can see it happening in front of our own two eyes). 

What if we could go about it a smarter way, a way that keeps the them at bay without having to hurt them, but because it is too much to do with our own limited capacities to care and quantise, there is only so much we can care about. If only we could settle our many differences in a civilised manner - have a couple of conversations about our differences, show each other how a different way of living is not a threat to what is a perceived normal, that a smaller cranium is not an indicator of intellectual capability, that orally recorded histories do not make for a less advanced society. We need learning, we need information, we need time to process, but most of all we need understanding. Communication is key.

A very brief history of the development of computers and where it stands today.
N*kia, connecting people.
Communications technology, its rapid development and exponential improvement in its capability and the ease with which it can bring individuals physically miles apart closer as if they were in the same space is among one of the most beneficial technologies, if not the most beneficial advances to above about as a by-product of years and years of waging war amongst ourselves as a species. Better functioning telephony systems, improved wireless capabilities, softwares that allowed these pre-existing systems to perform much better through data packet switching capabilities, standardised communication protocols. As Bratton (2016) says in his book to further impress the intangibility of the current state of communication, “These technologies align, layer by layer, into something like a vast, if also incomplete, pervasive if also irregular, software and hardware Stack.” And this all encompassing Stack, an abstraction of years of scientific enquiry, engineering research and computational progress, work often omitted in current conversations about the state of machines and the intelligence we haveimparted onto them, it comes about as the need for usto share more information and gather more information increases, again communication is key.

At the heart of it all stands the personal computer, the bastard child of telephony and telemetry. We have taken all that we needed and crammed it into one unit, and then set about making this unit as portable and maximal as possible. 

Well, we did technically make it into the Frankenstein’s monster that we find very hard to love as much anymore - a thing mouldable into whatever form we desired of it. We raised it from ground up, piece by piece, bit by ever so slightly intelligent bit. First we gave it switches to compute binaries of zeroes and ones, at this point only simple math, it was akin a glorified calculator. Then weoffered it smaller (read minuscule) improved switches (transistors, all the kinds) to compute larger binaries of true and false, with each decisional logic based on increasingly complicated relationships to a multitude of variables, to show us sights we could have never seen with our own two eyes. We gave it a way to interact with others of its kind - an extensive networks of cables spread across continents and seas, a way for it to communicate with beings that resembled it in form and function, and a way for us to live vicariously through its existence. And somewhere along the way, it became an extension of us, an indispensable element of our current lives, we can not be without it. But it can not be without us either.

Collective intelligence.
Can I (having being born in 1999) claim to have played any part in the progression of the internet into what it is today, or am I just a victim of the new social contract (comes with a higher bandwidth internet connection) that I’ve been born into?

The issue with taking about collectives is that it confers onto all parties the good, the bad and the ugly the collective is responsible for while ignoring the plight of the losing sides. As found in the case of discourse about innovation and progress, all things come about in the interest of the collective good, where the collective is usually an unmentioned upper ruling class. Holding up the interests of the top 1% are replaceable, nameless, (metaphorically) formless multitudes of middle classes working tirelessly day after day, making sure all the production deadlines are met, least they be replaced by another who can more effectively manage those very same deadlines. The unfortunate existence of an upper and a middle implies a more forgotten about lower class, one that never comes up in conversation when talking about the practical implications of said innovations, but only in lofty hyperbole about how any process is always in the benefit of the said lower classes - to completely alter their way of life and save them from a systemic generational  rat race that only came about due to the interests of the very same 1%.

The first person plural we finds itself in constant use when talking about intelligence and intelligent systems, as if it the generally accepted positive experience of living under these systems are a standard across all sorts of demographics in the combined human populace. But who is we? What about them, and the terror these others impose upon us. Intelligence is an instinct born out of fear of the unknown. In a world so advanced and yet so fractured, intelligence, both the abstract concept applied to the layperson and its usage as a term for the gathering and propagation of information relevant to the military, intelligence is the strong and muscular arm keeping the general public safe while newer technologies trained upon years of behavioural research work tirelessly off fossil fuels to protect us when the public closes their eyes to go to sleep at night.

The military-industrial complex and biases.The even longer arm of the military reaches out of thin air.
In their book The Stack, Bratton (2016) argues that the technology we are now unfortunately bound to has fundamentally changed the way the world is structured - there used to exist a purely geographic political jurisdiction of governance that has since been upended with the widespread pervasion of the internet; a former normal now completely altered, requiring new policies in place to moderate and monitor this unrestricted society that exists on a tangible but still very imaginary plane. But who, or rather what, has become the arbiter of rights and wrongs in this new virtual world? The rapid advances made in communications technology in just two decades around the tail end of the 2000s and the beginning of a new technological age that it called upon us all has given rise to two very distinct groups in the population alive today - a half that struggles to comprehend the devices that are in use, and a half to which a life without said devices seems almost unimaginable. It so happens that the former is considered older and wiser purely on the basis that they would have been part of the collective us that was around working on these technologies. 

For all the freedom the internet offers, its military origins often go unmentioned, with this slight erasure of source applying to almost all smart consumer technologies in circulation today. Most likely than not, any piece of technology that is taking data from the user to offer to them a service finds itself stemming from the murky bog of military research and development. Scientists, researchers and engineers, the actual we in any discourse about technology, all funded by governmental organisations to create a specialised functioning prototype of a thing that does x, with functioning prototypes finding its way into generalised commercial applications, and eventually into the hands of the lay masses. We, the masses.

But what does the internet have to do with intelligence? Everything. The internet ushered in a new age of information, and with all this information, a new age of fears. The internet, an actual nameless formless collective, takes without complaint. It takes what it is given, and for a price, will happily give it all away.

Abstraction, in programming languages is a way to hide from the user things that they do not need to know to utilise the functionality of said code. This abstraction applies to all consumer goods - while the individual should know what they are consuming, it is not necessary that they do due to the complexity of the technologies going to the design and manufacture of said goods. Hardware and software and intertwined to create smarter, intelligent even, devices. Code, however, is just words meant to resemble human linguistic patterns, so that the actual human behind the computer writing its functionality can bypass the need to learn the binaries computers actually process. It is all ones and zeroes. To even broach the subject of artificial intelligence, to talk about the sort of thing we’re(few programmers specialising in computers aided by years of research into the human psyche) are creating, we (all of us alive today who use any device connected to the internet) need to talk about ourselves. We have this thing, this intelligent machine - which is essentially a bunch of rare rocks thrown together with millions of magical words called syntax etched onto it to create this object that is somehow both lesser and greater than us, the people that made it - and we(the collective) did make it, as much as we hate to admit. Every piece of information transmitted and received by any individual, regardless of whether it was actively shared by or stolen from said individual, every piece of information finds its way into a convolutional network somewhere that is currently being trained to quantify what “right” looks like. And the sad truth is that some of your data and my data is under the “wrong” label.

Artificial intelligence is born out of the collective desire for more so that individuals can do less, it has roots in militia trying to leave the fear of the unknown to a device capable of learning what unknown looks like and assigning to this unknown a label of wrong or right. Over time it has become a pseudo-godly amalgamation of humanity’s best and humanity’s worst, an object parading around as both man and machine that is all seeing and all-knowing in the surveillance age we humans live in.

Cyborgs, chaos and the intelligence of man.(… …)
A traditional cyborg - a mechanical facsimile of man (humans) given an electronic consciousness allowing it to imitate human behaviour, but never quite coming close owing to its mechanical inability to feel what it truly means to be human - is a failed cyborg. Any person alive today is in essence a fully realised cyborg - a being of flesh aided by both its own intelligent brains and an external advanced computational device (although not for long in the never-ending human quest for more). The lines dividing human and machine blurs ever so slight as the human collective progresses as a species with the progress in its supporting technologies. As Haraway (1985) writes, “the certainty of what counts as nature - a source of insight and a promise of innocence - is undermined, probably fatally”. All that is left is to observe and study is the chaos left behind as the aftermath of progress.

Nothing about anything intelligent can be quantised correctly, not due to a lack of methodologies to do so, but because it has no inherent form, it is continuously evolving, driven by parameters well outside the scope of the environment it is being studied it. All the brain power and computational capability that can be mustered up to make sense of the intelligence in human actions and behaviours is still incapable of objectively understanding it. Quoting Gleick (1987) from their book on chaos.

Chaos should be taught […]. It was time to recognise that the standard education of a scientist gave the wrong impression. No matter how elaborate linear mathematics could get, with its Fourier transforms, its orthogonal functions, its regression techniques, […] it inevitably misled scientists about their overwhelmingly nonlinear world.

Nothing in any physical system under observation is free from parameters the researcher had not even considered taking into account due to the removed nature of said parameter - in a way, it made no sense to consider it, because logically what did it have to do with anything under review. And yet, it still had an effect.

The emergence of a new kind of intelligence, a non-human kind, has changed quite a lot of the pre-existing structure in the human approach to rationality. There is a new way humanity views the divide in power. What formerly used to be divides between genders and classes is now a divide between man and machine, an odd, but calm and accepted return to the technology panic from the 1960s and 70s. Where once was a class struggle is now just the struggle for existence and purpose. An AI could do what I do much faster and easier, and for much lesser, so where do I go from here?Where does humanity go from here? What started off as a complex of switches crunching numbers has given rise to a machine threatening the livelihoods of millions. It is intelligent when viewed from the eyes of those utilising these machines to maximise profits, but is it intelligent in the eyes of those left vulnerable, no. The machine can be objectively intelligent, it is only doing what it must to function as a machine, but viewed differently it has achieved what most people strive for, it is an advanced parasite, leeching off humanity’s need for greater. What was intelligent about the creation of such a machine?

Was it always going to come to this?
Is it a bird, is it a plane, no, its probably an autonomous surveillance drone?
“Whether he had a body or not never mattered”, is a poignant sentence that comes about in a conversation between two people in the show Serial Experiments Lain (1998), this conversation being about if a person can exist on as a virtual except copy of themselves and their psyche in a connected communications network very much like the internet today after their physical body has died. The show, in a way that only media can envision much earlier than the actual occurrence of such events, brings into focus the reality of the lives of many today. No individual can exist without being connected to another, whole lives are lived through and it could all be a farce, it is becoming increasingly hard to discern lived reality from the reality of the internet. Does an individual really need to live in the physical realm when the same can be done virtually in a safe protected environment? With tomes upon tomes of lived experiences to learn from, how far is a machine from replicating a whole life for itself, not very. Artificial intelligence coupled with human intelligence has ushered in an age where machines can think given enough time and material to learn from to do so, perhaps there will be a future where there is no difference between man and machine. 

Collectively, humanity as a species is not very smart. It’s scared and vulnerable, it is only just one of many that inhabit a planet that allowed for it to grow capable, dextrous and thus intelligent, to become the apex predator but with an advanced consciousness. The one key difference between the two, man and machine, now is the ability to imagine - to think ahead, to anticipate and prepare for uncertain eventualities. Considering the extensive work and research going towards making artificially intelligent machines more human-like, there might come a time where an individual and their computer are inseparable, not out of dependency, but because of integration of parts. Intelligence is fear of the unknown, and humanity is known to be afraid of the passage of time, so it isn’t all that unlikely that perhaps a merger of the mechanical capabilities of machines and the intellectual prowess of man is truly the only way forward for the species. To adapt is intelligence, after all, or whatever is the most applicable definition at that point in that future.