This is prompted by Ron’s remarks on the first AI blog…or blog on AI… Is it the case that the apparent ‘advantage’ of AI over human persons, that it can achieve an ‘objectivity’ or ‘neutrality’ (the latter is the preferred classification of capital), its Achilles heel? AI feeds on what already exists, it necessarily remains …
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Artificial Intelligence 2
Perhaps, instead of calling this new ideological product AI, we should refer to it as “machinic thinking”; I’m using ‘machinic’ rather than ‘machine’ deliberately because this term seems, to me, to capture the ways in which this technology is designed, and promoted, to imply the idea of “better than”, not “different to”. The end goal …
Artificial ‘Intelligence’? 1
This term, “Artificial Intelligence” (from hereon, AI), has managed to become part of everyday language without an apparent challenge to, or questioning of, what it means. The area of meaning seems the right place in which to start, particularly in regard to ‘intelligence’. The ‘intelligence’ being referred to, although classed as ‘artificial’, is actually that …
The Class of Education
We inhabit a university system in which Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies proliferate. Each university must have one and, apparently, to ensure these policies are followed, there is also a requirement for Universal Design (UD). Together, these ensure that lecturers do not populate their lecture series’ according to their own prejudices and biases which, …
Completeness as Sham
So we can see pattern narrative as the fundamental “building block” of society, which instils a need for completeness through the imposition of its fictional structure (beginning, middle, end) on ‘reality’ (‘realities’?). What also occurs here is the perception of life as a ‘quest’, a cause and event ‘journey, between birth and death. Or perhaps …
Completeness as Ideology
The psychological need for an ‘aim’ or ‘end’ is inculcated in us by fictional narrative, made ‘normal’ by our talking of Being rather than, as Heidegger states, Becoming – the latter term though being a more accurate description of “human life”. However, even accepting Heidegger’s distinction, we can see here a connection with the “quest …
The Fragmentation of Unity
At the centre of the capitalist project lies the contradiction between the individual and community. The former is fetishised, while the latter is divided into two: (i) An (unachievable because undesirable) aspiration and, (ii), a lost “golden age”, always past, always nostalgic. Community is the staple ingredient of the soap opera, embedded into a mythological …
A Digression: Universal Design
This is connected with my first blog on the Technical University and the businessification (pronounced business-ify-cation…couldn’t resist it) of education. I read three ‘corporate’ documents yesterday, all glossy pages, colourful graphs and photographs of happy smiley students, or ‘learners’ as the businesspeak that permeates the things insists on calling them. Strange that, our children’s primary …
The Fragmentation of the Subject
Art comes, as I’ve said, from dissatisfaction and conflict, so how does it end up promoting what it critiques? Put another way, how does capitalism repurpose and weaponise artefacts which are profoundly at odds with its ideology? By historicising these, then incorporating them into the system of “educational metrics”, coupled with the idea that developed …
Art as History
If Heidegger is right, that Art creates society rather than society creating Art, then what would this be like? Obviously, artefacts that are ‘favoured’ (approved of?) are, on a micro-level, passed down or passed around. Until recently, one’s taste in popular music was a shorthand for telling others who you were: you referenced bands as …
Murmurs from the Forest 