Page 351 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

332 Bert Olivier

therefore I think, therefore I am”, instead of the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”, with
its curiously disembodied ring – which one might discern as underpinning what Gelernter
calls “computationalism”. Hence Johnson’s (2013: location 2062-2075) implicit
challenge to AI-research (acknowledging, in an endnote [199], that second generation AI-
researchers have already adopted this “approach”):

If ‘intelligence’ cannot be abstracted from a certain being-in-the-world – in
natural historical terms the cybernetic gearing of articulated movement to the
environment – then artificial intelligence, if it is to achieve any level of equivalence
to biological intelligence, must to an extent be ‘reverse engineered’ from ‘nature’.

It is precisely this “being-in-the-world”, as presupposition of the kind of artificial
intelligence capable of truly simulating embodied human ‘intelligence’, that explains how
human beings can be experienced by themselves and others as ‘singular’. From what
Turkle as well as Merleau-Ponty was quoted as saying earlier, the human condition is one
of on-going, singularising, spatio-temporally embodied experience that constitutes an
ever-modified and nuanced personal history among other people and in relation to them.
Unless robotics and AI-research can prove themselves equal to the challenge of
constructing an intelligence that simulates this condition, it is bound to remain
distinctively ‘transhuman’, that is, beyond, and irreducibly different from, the human.

INFORMATION AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Turning to another imaginative portrayal of ‘transhuman’ artificial intelligence, this
time in literature, one finds its possibilities explored in terms of the ontological fabric of
information in digital format. This is highly relevant to the ontological difference
between AI and human ‘intelligence’ in the sense of the encompassing ‘spectrum’ as
conceived by Gelernter. After all, it is arguably not only in computer and robotic
intelligence that one encounters AI in its performativity; the very structure of information
comprises the condition of possibility of artificial intelligence as an emergent property.
By focusing on AI in this form, William Gibson — creator of Neuromancer, among other
gripping sci-fi novels (Olivier 2013) — has delved even further into the latent
possibilities, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1983; 1987) called ‘virtualities’, of the
information revolution. In his quotidian dimension-surpassing novel, Idoru (1996), one of
the so-called Bridge trilogy, Gibson has created the science-fictional literary conditions
of exploring these possibilities in the further development of AI-research.
My philosophical interest in Idoru is ontological — that is, I am interested in
Gibson’s capacity to illuminate the ontological mode of the virtual realm from within, as
it were, as well as to uncover cyberspace’s capacity of reality-generation that one would