Page 349 - Data Science Algorithms in a Week

330 Bert Olivier

been, and still is, an inalienable source of (re-) discovering ourselves as human beings. It
is not by accident that psychoanalysis is predicated on ‘the talking cure’.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH, PERSONAL SINGULARITY
AND REVERSE ENGINEERING

Christopher Johnson (2013) provides a plausible answer to the question concerning
the difference between human ‘intelligence’ and artificial intelligence. In a discussion of
the “technological imaginary” he points out (Johnson 2013: location 2188-2199) that the
difference between artificially intelligent beings like the ship-computer, HAL, in Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the robotic science officer, Ash, in Ridley
Scott’s Alien (1979), on the one hand, and human beings, on the other, is that the former
may be endlessly replicated (which is different from biological reproduction), that is,
replaced, while in the case of humans every person is singular, unique, and experienced
as such. This is the case, says Johnson, despite the fact that humans might be understood
as being genetically ‘the same’, as in the case of ‘identical’ twins, where it becomes
apparent that, despite the ostensible uniqueness of every person, we are indeed
genetically similar. When pursued further at molecular level, Johnson avers, this is
confirmed in properly “technological” terms.
From a different perspective one might retort that, genetic sameness notwithstanding,
what bestows upon a human subject her or his singularity is the outcome of the meeting
between genetic endowment and differentiated experience: no two human beings
experience their environment in an identical manner, and this results incrementally in
what is commonly known as one’s ‘personality’ (or perhaps, in ethically significant
terms, ‘character’). In Lacanian psychoanalytic terms, this amounts to the paradoxical
insight, that what characterises humans universally is that everyone is subject to a
singular “desire” (Lacan 1997: 311-325) – not in the sense of sexual desire (although it is
related), but in the much more fundamental sense of that which constitutes the
unconscious (abyssal) foundation of one’s jouissance (the ultimate, unbearable,
enjoyment or unique fulfilment that every subject strives for, but never quite attains). A
paradigmatic instance of such jouissance is symptomatically registered in the last word
that the eponymous protagonist of Orson Welles’s film, Citizen Kane (1941), utters
before he dies: “Rosebud” – a reference to the sled he had as a child, onto which he
metonymically projected his love for his mother, from whom he was cruelly separated at
the time. The point is that this is a distinctively human trait that no artificially constructed
being could possibly acquire because, by definition, it lacks a unique personal ‘history’.
One might detect in this insight a confirmation of Gelernter’s considered judgment,
that artificial intelligence research is misguided in its assumption that the paradigmatic
AI-model of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ applies to humans as much as to computers or, for