(Roughly) Daily

Recently, (Roughly) Daily looked at AI and our (that’s to say, humans’) possible relationships to it. In a consideration of Jame Bridle‘s new book, Ways of Being, Doug Bierend widens the iris, considering our relationship not only to intelligences we might create but also to those with which we already co-habit…

It’s lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be. We humans tend to see ourselves as the anointed objects of evolution, our intelligence representing the leading edge of unlikely order cultivated amid an entropic universe. While there is no way to determine any purpose or intention behind the processes that produced us, let alone where they will or should lead, that hasn’t stopped some from making assertions. 

For example, consider the school of thought called longtermism, explored by Phil Torres in this essay for Aeon. Longtermism — a worldview held, as Torres notes, by some highly influential people including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, tech entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn, and Jason Matheny, President Biden’s deputy assistant for technology and national security — essentially sees the prime directive of Homo sapiens as one of maximizing the “potential” of our species. That potential — often defined along such utilitarian lines as maximizing the population, distribution, longevity, and comfort that future humans could achieve over the coming millennia — is what longtermers say should drive the decisions we make today. Its most extreme version represents a kind of interstellar manifest destiny, human exceptionalism on the vastest possible scale. The stars are mere substrate for the extension and preservation of our species’ putatively unique gifts. Some fondly imagine our distant descendants cast throughout the universe in womb-like symbiosis with machines, ensconced in virtual environments enjoying perpetual states of bliss —The Matrix as utopia. 

Longtermist philosophy also overlaps with the “transhumanist” line of thought, articulated by figures such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, who describes human nature as incomplete, “a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.” Here, humanity as currently or historically constituted isn’t an end so much as a means of realizing some far greater fate. Transhumanism espouses the possibility of slipping the surly bonds of our limited brains and bodies to become “more than human,” in a sense reminiscent of fictional android builder Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner: “Commerce is our goal,” Tyrell boasts. “‘More human than human’ is our motto.” Rather than celebrating and deepening our role within the world that produced us, these outlooks seek to exaggerate and consummate a centuries-long process of separation historically enabled by the paired forces of technology and capital. 

But this is not the only possible conception of the more than human. In their excellent new book Ways of Being, James Bridle also invokes the “more than human,” not as an effort to exceed our own limitations through various forms of enhancement but as a mega-category that collects within it essentially everything, from microbes and plants to water and stone, even machines. It is a grouping so vast and diverse as to be indefinable, which is part of Bridle’s point: The category disappears, and the interactions within it are what matters. More-than-human, in this usage, dismisses human exceptionalism in favor of recognizing the ecological nature of our existence, the co-construction of our lives, futures, and minds with the world itself. 

From this point of view, human intelligence is just one form of a more universal phenomenon, an emergent “flowering” found all throughout the evolutionary tree. It is among the tangled bramble of all life that our intelligence becomes intelligible, a gestalt rather than a particular trait. As Bridle writes, “intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does. It is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.” In Bridle’s telling, mind and meaning alike exist by way of relationship with everything else in the world, living or not. Accepting this, it makes little sense to elevate human agency and priorities above all others. If our minds are exceptional, it is still only in terms of their relationship to everything else that acts within the world. That is, our minds, like our bodies, aren’t just ours; they are contingent on everything else, which would suggest that the path forward should involve moving with the wider world rather than attempting to escape or surpass it.

This way of thinking borrows heavily from Indigenous concepts and cosmologies. It decenters human perspective and priorities, instead setting them within an infinite concatenation of agents engaged in the collective project of existence. No one viewpoint is more favored than another, not even of the biological over the mineral or mechanical. It is an invitation to engage with the “more-than-human” world not as though it consisted of objects but rather fellow subjects. This would cut against the impulse to enclose and conquer nature, which has been reified by our very study of it….

Technology often presupposes human domination, but it could instead reflect our ecological dependence: “Entangled Intelligence,” from @DougBierend in @_reallifemag (via @inevernu and @sentiers). Eminently worth reading in full.

* Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations

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As we welcome fellow travelers, we might recall that this date in 1752 was the final day of use of the Julian calendar in Great Britain, Ireland, and the British colonies, including those on the East coast of America. Eleven days were skipped to sync to the Gregorian calendar, which was designed to realign the calendar with equinoxes. Hence the following day was September 14. (Most of Europe had shifted, by Papal decree, to the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century; Russia and China made the move in the 20th century.)

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