Our Sociomaterial Entanglement with AI

Abstract

Contrary to the frenzy of hyperbolic rhetoric preaching artificial intelligence (AI) as an economic imperative for nations, the way it is entangled with all aspects of our lives calls for inquiry into its meaning beyond a passive prop whose affordances unfold as we handle it. This view does not offer much beyond AI’s existence as a carrier of meaning within the symbolic orders that make our world. Instead, one might muse on the way AI “compute” – the domestic computational power AI developers train to generate new content from vast amounts of data –reproduces our “real” via simulated models. These models are contingent upon how well the simulation process is trained, and therefore, their output is a mere copy that supersedes, displaces, replaces and thereby anticipates our real. What we share with AI is no longer our entanglement; we are parts of a simulation that permeates and makes our relationship with AI possible. The simulation escapes the entrenched Cartesian divide of subject and object by modeling our encounters with AI as a complex mixture of signs and interactions. It bypasses the dualistic relationship of the human and technology as a matter of cause and effect to impose another connector. A nondeterministic inclination, a generative tendency toward an ideal form that connects us with AI.