The artistic merits of automated statistics
Bruce Sterling talks about AI at the WIIH.
When: Wednesday, October 23rd, 215pm
Where: Mary Lyon Hall, May Room
Or join us for the virtual discussion with Bruce or participate on Zoom at https://wheatoncollege-edu.zoom.us/j/94161578007
“AI is not entrepreneural in spirit, it is not exciting, cutting edge start up innovation. AI is big tech oligarchy.” Bruce Sterling
As one of the inventors of Cyberpunk, Bruce Sterling has been studying AI and writing about it for decades. (Legend says that at one time Marvin Minsky broke down on his chair broke while he was sitting together with Bruce):
“I am really interested in the literary aspects of AIs like chatGPT, what kind of fiction does it write? What are AI’s effect on language and books? … It is going to be weird in ways that are very little understood. Like text-to-image generators: Nobody in AI was ever talking about that, or has predicted the appearance of these generators. These machines are not on any standard branch of futurism. From my point of looking at future development of technologies, these AI generators look as weird as a live trilobite be discovered. They don’t fit in, and their children are not going to fit in either.”
It is enlightening to follow Bruce’s critique of AI style and the weirdness of AI language in his crucial essay “Preliminary Notes on the Delvish Dialect” and to his general view on the future of AI as philosopher of design as well as science fiction author:
“Machine Translation, natural language processing: I use AI a lot. I know it is not nearly as good as human translators. It has no understanding. … The text generators are no authors, they are no poets. And yet, my head is after it. It’s really a great technology. It is super interesting. It does not have the literary merit of a human being, but is has the literary merits of something else. … There are areas in the creative world where AI will be very visible and even dominant, such as image processing, cinema special effects, sound processing, and language processing. But in 20 years, these applications will have vanished into the general mush of software, subsumed into features. It is not a revolution. With this label and a promise of “Artificial Intelligence”, these machines seem pathetic. It is easy to dismiss them. It is not “The Singularity”. It does not fulfil the aspiration of the original AI founders in Dartmouth College. AI is the wrong term. I like the term “Automated Statistics” much better. If we think of them this way, it is amazing how much effect this automated statistics can have!”
Bruce, one of the better known Bruce Sterlings as he often describes himself, is a writer, journalist, design philosopher and futurist. He has written a dozen science fiction novels and many short stories for which he earned several Hugo awards and other prizes. As a writer as well as an editor of anthologies like MIT Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, Bruce plays a main role in shaping the genre of cyberpunk.
Bruce’s signature is detecting trends far ahead of the mainstream; his non-fiction books like ‘The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder at the Electronic Frontier’ from 1992, or ‘The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” from 2014 are must-reads for everyone interested in techno-cultural trends. Very appropriately Bruce was appointed “inagural visonary in residence” at the ‘Center for Science and the Imagination’ at University of Arizona in 2013. His commencing keynote has been the highlight of every SXSW conference from its beginnings.
I first remember seeing Bruce Sterling’s face when he was featured on the cover of the inaugural issue of Wired Magazine in 1993: “Bruce Sterling has seen the future of war”. Bruce’s thoughts on design, technology, the future and the history for me personally have since then been a continuous source of inspiration and wonder. Just a few days ago Bruce’s new book came out: Robot Artists and Black Swans, which is a beautiful collection of his stories written in Italy.
Read: “Artificial Intelligence explains “cyberpunk” to Bruce Sterling, 2024 A.D.”
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