Bath University AI Research Seminar

AI, Technicity and Souls:Military AI and Automation

Context• Media/cultural studies, film, animation• Abiding interest in war as part of culture/media

• And philosophical work on technology and its part in human culture, media, war etc.

Aim• PART 1 Situate development of AI/automated robotics generally

as human technological development – philosophy of ‘technicity’

• PART 2 Some comments on war/military technoscience (and AI)

• PART 3 A critique of Ronald Arkin’s propositions concerning the automationof lethal robotic systems (more a ‘diagnosis’ of his thinking – and I promise tosay something about souls)

PART 1 – ‘TECHNICITY’

Andre Leroi-Gourhan

• ‘Exteriorisation’ – exporting of functions (hunting, gathering, shelter) to external objects

• Non-organic, quasi-evolutionary dynamic

Ethno-cultural not genetic evolution;‘epi-phylogenetic’ notphylogenetic…

Stiegler

• The long dance of the ‘who’ and the ‘what’:Both ‘lead’ and both ‘follow’ so much so it is impossible to say once and for all who or what came first

The human ‘being’ is a becoming.Human being is a being-in-default of an essential nature….

• Show clip from The Ister…. Of the ancient Greek myth of the origin of humanity.

Technicity

= this condition of not having a stable, essential condition.

• We become in relation to technological dynamics that are not simply our tools to make our life easier, our labour more efficient. But nor are they independent of us completely

• Organology: study of relations of the 2 kinds of “organs”: the biological (brain, body, group) and the technical (Ancient Greek organon – tool, instrument )

Eg. war

• (war and technological modernity go hand in glove)

Mass production and arms manufacture

Mass production of killing

Ballistics calcs, then H-bomb modelling and simulation

And these things…..

War is ‘fictional’• Strife over ways of living (= ways of adopting

technically enabled possibilities)• Who are we/what are we to become (or

remain? Or ‘go back to’?)

• ALL FICTIONS (which is not to say unimportant: on the contrary! Pay strict attention to your ‘stories’ and ‘histories’)

• And remember they are technically implemented and conditioned/shaped

Some of the adoptions of these technological developments

These developments are double-edged, not neutral tools but dynamics

PART 2: AI (‘Cognitive simulation’)

Arthur Samuels’ Checkers program for IBM 1956

Stan Ulam H-Bomb researcher team’s ‘Los Alamos Chess’ program on the MANIAC at Los Alamos National Lab, 1956

AI ‘paradigms’

• This

is the model of this (symbolic manipulation)

• Embodied intelligence (material process, emergent quality of lower level operations)

Marco Dorigo’s Swarmanoid project

Technicity is missing

• Classic AI: yes of course the digital computer is a model of thinking. But not the first, the only or the ultimate one.

and• Thinking has already been coloured/directed

technically and technologically in a long history of different histories of cultural beliefs/concepts/ways of living

Other models of thinking

Above: Watt & Boulton’s Steam engine governor;Left: Indigenous Australian sand-painting ceremony

Colouring of ‘thought’

Jacquard Loom

And…

Peter Galison: the “Manichean sciences” of dealing with the “calculating enemy other”

Technocultural Programme

• Leroi-Gourhan: culture amounts to a pro-gramme for behaviour, ways to live, that is technical and conceptual, exterior and interior

• Stiegler: this programme is a response to the ‘who are we?’ question of human being, the being without an essential identity.

• It programs our thinking…..

AI• A programming development “programmed”

by the Western technocultural programme.

PART 3: ARKIN’S DEADLY AI or, ‘artificial stupidity’

In the future….Advances in computing speeds and capacity will change how technology affects the OODA loop [Observe, Orient, Decide and Act]. Today the role of technology is changing from supporting to fully participating with humans in each step of the process. In 2047 technology will be able to reduce the time to complete the OODA loop to micro or nano- seconds. Much like a chess master can outperform proficient chess players, UAS will be able to react at these speeds and therefore this loop moves toward becoming a “perceive and act” vector. Increasingly humans will no longer be “in the loop” but rather “on the loop” – monitoring the execution of certain decisions. Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input (41).

Actually, already

Samsung SGR-1

Arkin

Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, Boca Raton FL, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009)

‘Ethical governor’

• ‘inspiration’ from Watt’s mechanical governor that was ‘intended to ensure that the mechanism behaved safely and within predefined bounds of performance’ (128)

• A ‘bolt-on component between the hybrid architectural system [robot/software/human operator] and the actuators’ (127)

Critiques and opposition

Exteriorisation unbounded

• Delegation of functions/capacities that will wreck the dynamic to and fro between:

‘human’ and technical extension/prosthesisThought/judgment/consideration/care/responsibility/self-reflection AndAction, procedure, task, duty, system of operations, Technocultural ‘programme’

Forgetting…

• Our fictional character• Our provisional, contingent character• That war is a failure to negotiate these fictions

peacefully

• Automating war’s prosecution is the worst imaginable response to this failure

A better (if older) model of thought

• Not Calculation—decision, or ‘perceive and act’ models

• But intermittent emergence of higher ‘intelligence’ out of the constant interactions of the lower ‘souls’

• Aristotle’s De Anima – soul as animating force/principle

3 souls of living beings

• Vegetative soul: capacity to nourish and reproduce (eg. plants)

• Sensitive soul: capacity for sense perception and movement/action in response (eg. animals)

• Noetic soul (for Aristotle, only the human posesses this): capacity for self-reflection, thought

Stiegler: read Aristotle dynamically

• The capacities are overlapping and in dialogue• The ‘noetic’ is a potential of the human, that

appears intermittently• Always the potential of ‘regression’ to less

reflective, more ‘automatic’ modes of actingAnd• The human is always a human-technical

composition, so ‘our’ noetic, intelligent potential is technically conditioned,

As is our ‘regression’

DARPA Long-range anti-ship missile

‘LOCUST’ system– US Office of Naval Research