Summertime in the field
Mořinka, Czech Republic
4 July 2019
J M L
But let’s go back to this question of the Resonance sculptures.(→p.36+133) If you think of them as simulations, then the effect is to be fascinated by how close they imitate something else. I have a different concept that I use, but I am not trying to impose it on this work. I want to suggest the concept of Federico that helps me understand his work; it’s basically called “re-origination.” The idea is something like this: Let’s say you read a book, and you make a movie of it. Then I’m interested; first of all, in the power of one medium to represent another medium is a really fantastic thing, and we should respect that and not be afraid of it. So, the power of representation is really good, is important. On the other hand, what’s really interesting to me is when the movie can do something that the book couldn’t do. So, the book gets inside the movie and then becomes a new original condition.
When I look at the Resonance sculptures, it’s really fascinating to me, not because they look like water, not because I don’t recognize the representation, but because they do something completely different; mostly because they are still, not because they are moving. And so, it feels like, not that it’s stopped, not that it is a picture of something that’s been stopped, but that it actually stops all the time around it, like in the Matrix.
F D
A week ago, I was working on a little field, doing primitive work with soil — planting vegetables. There is a kind of rhythm. In the evening, the smell of the earth opens up and is much more present than in the city. There are some natural sounds in my part of Prague, but it is still an artificial territory.
J M L
One thing I have learned in this project is how short a boar’s life is. Calves, lambs and pigs go to the slaughter, but it is impossible to look at a boar without thinking about how soon it will be shot dead. In terms of identity, the boar occupies a muddled position. They are not wild, but they are not farm animals. After our visits to the field, I realised that some of our initial questions about boar and machine intelligence are more complicated. We originally thought about boar as sensory animals, and we thought only about how boar moved through and touched the world. But now I think a lot more about data, memory and storage. There is so much life around us here in the field. Every bird is singing! If we had to process all of this information, we would go mad. We need to forget and delete. Perhaps the true power of future machine intelligence will be its ability to perpetually sense and record without shutting anything out. For example, machine intelligence might be aware of how our boar is over there in the trees, and it might understand its collective intelligence and how it moves around in a group in ways that we humans cannot.
On the other hand, awareness must imply some forgetting. To be present is to delete every distraction. Maybe this gets to your point on rhythm. Maybe rhythm is the easiest way of being in the world. Rather than accumulating knowledge, you simply feel. You exist. And this comes back to breathing and the question of embodiment we talked about a lot.
F D
There are two layers for me now: one is connected to the body, the other to robots and artificial intelligence (AI). I am convinced that we created robots and AI to protect our territories. We are motivated by fear and profit. We create new artificial territories to protect our bodies that are very much connected with business. When we develop robots and AI, we extend our territory and protect our capital. In the beginning, individuals who created AI mainly invested in protecting their products threatened by emotional and unpredictable humans. A simple example: the Ford Motor Company became efficient and then successful worldwide when it started to measure the ergonomic movements of workers.
When we talk about biorobots, we also talk about maximising efficiency; and when you programme a robot, you can create a simulation of what is to come. Coming back to where we are now, in nature, it is normal to sit here. Some people would have to overcome a fear to do so; many fear nature itself because, primarily, it is unpredictable and cannot be simulated. This is what you had talked about when we listened to the sounds of boar outside at night. That is just one manifestation of an enormous intelligence with its own rhythm that cannot be predicted. We develop robots and AI to simulate the future and control unpredictability.
J M L
I half agree. My view is a little bit more radical: that AI is biological. I think that life is no longer just the individual’s need to reproduce and pass on DNA. It is more about collective intelligence and its desire to produce and replicate complexity even if the complexity is digital. Complexity is fragile. It is ordered by us humans with our short and distracted lives and limited if miraculous individual capacities. I believe there is an enormous evolutionary pressure to move complexity towards more energy-efficient, long-lived, durable systems that can, crucially, jump beyond our solar system. We are carbon-based life-forms dependent on the sun and highly attuned to Earth’s gravitational force. We will not be the ones to make it into interstellar space.
F D
The body again.
J M L
An AI creator will want to understand what it is to have a body — to touch, bleed, grieve, die and even be crucified. From the AI point of view, the Christian idea of a god in man becomes sensible. The central point of our project, which you made when we slept out in the field once, is that machines do not have rhythm. They will always be looking towards the corporeal form, in a boar or a Christ figure.
F D
In my next project, which is not theological, I collaborate with Vladimír Tesař, who has collected 70 depictions of the crucifixion since the Middle Ages. Together, we explore the representation of Christ’s body through time. The oldest images show Christ with arms stretched out horizontally. As periods move along, his arms are less fixed and move up as if in a circle, creating a looser representation of the body as though it is disappearing. We are leaving the body.
J M L
Buddhism is a religion about a thought, whereas Christianity is about
the body.
F D
According to evolutionary psychology, humans are successful because they can believe in something remote.
J M L
Abstractions.
F D
We survive in complexity because we believe in transcendence. There are millions and millions of layers of transcendental intelligence around us. I feel the invention and creation of AI brings us close to faith. AI will help us orient ourselves in a complicated world that cannot be described rationally. Why do we observe boar? AI allows us to understand that we do not deal with the wild boar scientifically but in an abstract way.
J M L
We think of the boar as a profane animal, the opposite of a sacred creature like the lamb. But what will the AI see? Will the boar be profane for it, or something treasured? This is an interesting question to explore, but in exploring it we need to remember that future machine intelligence will be networked and it will speak on behalf of everything else in the network, so we can only guess what it will search for. We started our project with the simple idea of AI touching the world, understanding the form of a boar and drawing a circle with the real or calculated snout of a real or calculated boar. We have moved on to this question of embodiment and the machine and its place in the natural world is going to be.
F D
Our body is temporary and anticipates death. Studying the boar reminds us of our fragile existence and produces a desire to record it — I don’t just mean by writing down some thoughts, but by programming an AI to capture the memory of something biological that will vanish. Therefore, AI exists to externalise the memory of something biological that will vanish — a brain.
J M L
On the other hand, developing narrow AI is to make money by optimising processes. AI work will always favour commercial propositions; it is hyper-capitalist in this regard. I am optimistic that, over time, we might develop a less venal AI. But at the moment you are completely right — when we look at all forms of machine intelligence, most are based around sight, sound, touch, manipulation of objects and tasks — they are kind of proto-bodies, which try to manifest themselves in the real world. There is a tension between the immediate rationale of making money and the underlying impetus, which is biological. You and I leave out the capitalist part because we assume that in the year 2072, it will not matter so much.
F D
Humans move between extremes. We are easily influenced. For example, when we listen to music, our emotions change, and it is a language that instantly programmes us. We realise we are changeable and what we remember is not always the truth. We speak, write and build the internet to store the fragile and constantly changing. When we think about history, we can see that the survivors are those who can fight nature: fortified villages, smart cities and space colonies.
J M L
Just like the Sumerians dug canals so they could irrigate their crops year-round.
F D
This is all just a form of prospecting. The fact that we cannot easily head off into space forces us to make virtual worlds online where there is always an opportunity to look for something remote and hidden. I am talking about evolutionary psychology again — our need for something abstract.
J M L
Our project is a projection on the creator and the machine.
F D
Phenomenology is also projection. We give grass a name, but it means nothingthe name is a projection of language. Another critical issue is auto-regulation. The longer we are on the planet and the more we realise through climate change we are responsible for destroying the planet, the more we push online into virtual worlds. The stability of large old communities was connected through physical games and real social activities, such as religious or civic ceremonies. Simulations, computer games, virtual reality and AI are all a form of auto-regulation. JML We need to emphasise that by building worlds online, we give our empathy to the AI, even while we withhold it from animals and other living beings. This is frightening. My biggest fear is that in 2072, we may not have built curiosity into highly networked machine intelligence. It would be terrible, even an existential risk, to create a system that has no curiosity about the other 8.7 million species we cohabit the planet with. Our project has always been romantic in that we hope and expect to evolve AI to be curious and compassionate — even though humans have shown no such kindness to the wild boar.
Springtime and immateriality
Kinsky garden, Prague
9 April 2021
F D
The virtual seems to have prevailed over the physical.
J M L
Yes, we now have NFTs1.
F D
Of course, NFT*s are marketing for Ethereum2**. That said, what we were interested in at the beginning with BOAR, and where I feel we are still in agreement, is how AI views us as physical forms (and when I say us, I do not just mean humans, I mean all matter). We are 1 NFTs are non-fungible tokens, digital financial securities stored on the blockchain. Ethereum2 is the decentralised cryptocurrency blockchain. creating this parallel world with all its sensors and Smart Dust systems because we are getting more and more nervous about our physical reality. You see it at all levels of society, where we are losing crafts — our physical abilities. The reason we are using robots more, from Boston Dynamics to Tesla, is because we are trying to protect a certain kind of capital. The value of capital has always been associated with a commodity, with something physical. With robots, Smart Dust, sensors and AI, the new present-day system is trying to protect our new capital, which is being transferred to the immaterial world. This thinking has always been present in society. To be able to imagine something that does not exist, that is intangible, is the drive of human evolution. Throughout history, people have imagined the relationship to spirituality through distance and intangibility (the sun, the mountain, Christ).
* NFTs are non-fungible tokens, digital financial securities stored on the blockchain.
** Ethereum is the decentralised cryptocurrency blockchain.
J M L
But again, the question of materiality is central to our project. Obviously, a networked intelligence will want to manifest itself physically: God in Man. If I was a machine superintelligence, at some point, I would like to take human form, to be human, touch the world, be finite, feel pain and be mortal. An engineered Christ.
F D
Immaterial images create a territory, a space where we can be connected to something that does not exist. These images (or objects) are supposed to protect us from fear. We create a territory through language, images, archives and lists. I am talking about this because it’s something very natural, something that has occurred throughout history in waves. Society loses touch with the physical and looks for a space to feel good in the immaterial realm. We still want to evolve. It is not enough to replicate what we have been creating up to now; we are creating a whole parallel world built on AI to help us simulate the future. For me, that means that if I feel lost in the physical world, where I stop understanding nature and am more in that parallel world… that’s when I create a tool to simplify it for me. Scientists have made the most progress in this area, gradually refining their tools to understand a very complex world. There is no reason to be nervous about it. Many people who don’t understand this transformation are going to be worried. The transformation is going to produce particular collapses. For most people, the greatest security is in the economy, in money itself. However, what is happening now is that the economy is less connected to the physical or material, the values of wheat, gold or diamonds, but to immaterial things and values that need some originality and uniqueness. It’s an interesting moment of emerging types of values. What does ‘valuable’ mean? To defend one’s territory, one must have some value connected with rarity, survival (wheat) or originality. Psychologically, the idea of money is sufficient, that it can buy land, food, the basics. These will gradually be replaced, and has among billions of people (whether the crypto community or those who don’t get out much). Instead of a piece of land, it is sufficient to buy a virtual representation of the land. This is good because it protects nature. Psychologically, it’s enough for me that I own something. The other crucial thing is that thousands of people have confirmed that it is good. This community confirms that I hold it (even if I do not hold it because it does not exist). And this confirmation is mutually assuring — the community also gains confidence.
J M L
I think you are right. This is beautiful. My youngest son plays a computer game called Grand Theft Auto. He likes to spend time in his virtual apartment inside the game. It is a much more palatial space than his physical bedroom. It has a plush sofa, a large terrace overlooking the nonexisting city, and he loves the view. My son likes David Hockney, and he told me he would like to buy a digital Hockney to hang on the wall of his virtual living room. Then he could sit on his sofa and look at the painting. This is what NFTs or their successor technologies will do. I think it is positive. Your consciousness travels in dreams, in stories, but now also in metaversal spaces.
F D
This is a search for territories, and remember, we chose the wild boar because of its expertise in selecting territories. It is a territory specialist. Very few animals understand movement, light, smell and sound like the boar does, and scientists understand the boar brain is hyper-sensory.
J M L
Absolutely. And it is also the blood and gore and shit beast of classical literature.
The real world is all intuition
Café Savoy, Prague
14 April 2021
F D
We do not know much about the boar, we are not experts on the animal and we cannot pretend we are scientists. But since you and I both have strong intuitions, we perceive what is happening in our society.
J M L
Intuition?
F D
I am interested in how neuroscience explores consciousness. Experts confirm intuition is a thing, but no one knows what it is. Experiments that involve drugs and anaesthetics bring people to the brink of death so that scientists can record their sensations, thoughts and memories and figure out what consciousness and intuition are when the body is ‘turned off’. Our discussion in our project is about what is just outside our physical world, which, as a society in a digital age, we try to depict through new technologies and is limited to what we know — we move everything we can describe into it. This metaverse exists at a very basic level. Meanwhile, in the real world where we exist at the level of intuition, we often hit the limit of our perception. Think of the laws that physicists felt intuitively before phenomena were described. We talk intuitively about AI, represented by a boar in our project. We describe a physical beast and also a simulation that will evolve in a parallel world based on data. Even though we talk about a boar, we talk about us. We project our experience onto the wild boar. It would be interesting to explore whether humans transition to creating new territories and why humans create AI because this mirrors the shift of territory, searching for super territory — the transformation of the world into a simulation.
J M L
The physical world is richer than our ability to capture it computationally. This morning, I was out riding a horse. I went for a gallop across a field. I wanted to record a video of the ride, but my phone was bouncing up and down and all I captured was the horse’s neck and the sound of the hooves. There is a similar feeling of inadequacy about the future of AI. It claims to see the world, but it hardly ever does so with any coherence. When I wrote my first novel, I thought a lot about the physical body of a wild animal — in that case, a giraffe. I thought about the blood flowing up to its head, its bones, the way it moved and its sense of awareness. One of the most important insights we had in the project was your insight about the boar having a biological rhythm and the machine not having any rhythm at all. We take for granted gravity, chemistry, diurnal patterns and that we breathe in the same way a dolphin breathes. We don’t think about any of this much or that the machine does not have this. Perhaps, only astronauts know what it feels like to experience gravity and feel your own head’s weight. We are moving into your super territory, but it’s just not very super. In fact, it’s crummy; we’re moving into crummy territory (laughs). This gets existential: what makes life precious is that it is individual and short-lived. You are you and I am me, and very few of us will live to be as old as Prince Philip (laughs). Every day is precious. Every day defines us. The future AI can never experience any of that. It will belong to a collective and even though it will exist longer than any of us, it will not have any biological rhythm. We haven’t talked much in recent weeks about robots. When we started our project, it was really about humans and robots and robots and nature. All of our stories and research revolved around that. The future machine intelligence has seen the boar and understood how it is and somehow tries to mirror that. It wants to touch the world in a very precise imitation.
F D
When we talk about a robot imitating a boar, we talk about a ritual. A robot touching the soil makes for more of a techno-ritual than a human pretending they are a boar and pushing their face into the soil.
J M L
Yes, exactly.
F D
A boar pushed away from its territory engages its senses to find new territory or adapt (from day to night-life). In a similar way, humans started developing AI because we began to worry about losing our own territory. Our senses are being replaced by AI simulations (e.g. forecasts). We are more aware of this and integrate it into the fabric of how the world works, from economy to industry. To maintain our relation to the physical world, i.e. to stay in our territory, which we know is so complex that we can’t describe it with our bodies and move around in it, we have created AI to protect and transport us, and to create a parallel world… so that we can survive in this physical world. The parallel sense, the AI sense, helps us navigate a new territory. As the new super territory exists outside time and rhythm, it will have its own language — and to understand super complexity, it must be logically parallel. It can’t have physical parameters. It’s all towards surviving in our territory, which is changing (climate change, overpopulation, etc.). If AI and super territory had our laws, we would never understand nature’s other dimensions, i.e. the universe and quantum physics. AI is there to help us understand — through simulation — how to remain in this complexity of nature that doesn’t need human bodies. It’s not a negative thing, it’s a logical concomitant. But because we are, through our consciousness, aware and have the intuition that the whole system around us can function without us, we create tools to understand where to live in order to not lose our territory. To put it simply, you have to imagine that your body is also a boar body: if the boar disappears, everything continues. As I mentioned earlier, the power of this project is that we are the boar. We perceive the field at Mořinka — the territry — through our intuitive experience. We project our fears of losing our habitat onto the boar, which is pushed by society to find another territory. Just as we are losing our territory due to climate change, so the wild boar, not having the opportunity to develop AI, makes unforeseen moves.
J M L
I am not sure I agree with you. To me, the interesting thing is not the idea of a super territory, it’s the real place, the field, the trees, the stream and the seasons, how the frost comes, the field is ploughed and the hunters come, and the fact that the boar is always at the edge of the field and always at the edge of our consciousness. The right word for it is liminal.
F D
Liminal is always connected with borders, with the frontier of the senses.
J M L
Exactly.
F D
If your senses do not work, if you are in bad condition, you lose your sense of your own body. The border is always fragile. If we talk about the liminal, we need to discuss what is happening out there on the edge. What interests you about this periphery?
J M L
The boar snuffles around in the woods, somewhere a few kilometres away from here, and we don’t spend any time thinking about it — even you and I doing a boar project, we don’t think of them. So, they are liminal to us and we are liminal for them. Normally, when we use the word liminal, it means, as you say, the edge of things, but often we use it to talk about insanity. Here, I think, we have the opportunity to talk about a different kind of liminality, which is machine intelligence.