and this is why Sam Altman himself has invested a lot of money in nuclear
fusion which he believes is going to be or is most likely to be the direction in which
this kind of energy problem is going to be solved.
and no doubt he's a guy who has in
mind to some extent the problems of climate change and fossil fuel use
and believes that not only that AI is going to be a benefit to the world,
even though it's something he worries about,
but also that it can only be a benefit if some kind of solution to the
production of energy is brought about
and my understanding, I don't know if nuclear fusion is realistic or unrealistic.
Obviously this is a very technical question but it's also a question
that I believe that AI has something to do with.
There's a kind of a circle here in the sense that
controlling the reactions is one of the main problems involved in making a scalable form
of nuclear fusion and that AI somehow can solve this potentially in a way that more let's say
mechanical methods find almost impossible because of the complexity of the process.
The second thing is when he's asked about the possibility of what he called general
artificial intelligence [Ed.: AGI], in other words we could say real AI,
in the sense that these kind of people talk.
First he wants to say that ChatGPT is really a non-event in this regard in the sense he asks, he the
interviewee asks in this case, "do you feel that the global economy is any different?", and the answer
is no for him, and for the interviewer, that it might have made a big splash but in terms of
really making any kind of transformation we're very far from that yet
And when he's asked what would count as that kind of transformation the answer he comes up with is if it makes a
significant difference to the rate of scientific discovery.
And you can you could ask here if this is related to the kind of thing that Chris Anderson was talking about with the end of theory,
the idea that the correlations of patterns are able to be discovered so efficiently and so well
with this massive use of data and these powerful and very rapid programs that it's no longer
necessary to have hypotheses and so on and so forth, that simply discovery will be a
matter of what is illuminated through these patterns and correlations and of course we know
not only Stiegler but for instance Giuseppe Longo would say that one of the main problems with that
idea is that you can always find patterns and correlations, if you have enough data, if you
have a gigantic enough amount of data just for the sake of random effects, it will always be
possible to find to be to find correlations and patterns that then may well be indicative
of nothing.
So one could look at it like that but at the same time I don't know if he's, Sam Altman
is, quite as simple-minded as that.
I think what he's imagining is something some kind of tools
that are used by researchers in some more noetic way let's say,
and in case of technology rather than pure science where of course, the whole point here is that we don't want to make
this distinction between pure science and technology anymore, you could point for example
to the question of automated driving and say, well, in the case of Tesla what they did is
tried to program how to drive a car through the city by itself etc.
And then after a while they realized that it was very difficult especially because
they didn't, they chose not to, use complicated radar systems (that other companies used),
to rely on video, but that what they did have was gigantic amounts of data that were coming from the cars,
and that this would be open to kind of AI analysis that could, through machine learning,
solve this question of automated driving more efficiently and better than these more expensive
and extremely hard to program solutions that have been tried before, and tried by other companies.
Whether that in fact is achieved in the end is not yet decided I don't think, but probably it is
on the way.
And so you could make the case that in terms of technology this was, this is an example where
this kind of computational program can accelerate greatly the rate of technological
innovation in this kind of automation.
The third thing is when he's asked about the consequences of reaching some kind of high level of
AI.
And where he says that his perspective on it is that it's necessary to have government regulation of AI
so in this way I guess we could say that Sam Altman is not exactly a kind of libertarian,
of the kind that we know common in its Silicon Valley etc.
Even if we don't want to say he's completely different, and even if maybe his perspective is unclear
about exactly what kind of regulation that would mean,
what he really is in favor of, what he really is against,
what he really thinks is the a role of innovation...
It's easy to say a lot of things in an interview but nevertheless.
His perspective here is that the power of this kind of technology
is going to be extremely great, and that it's necessary to have some kind of
localized authority, like a government, in order to control the direction of
this development, and the use to which it's put.
What do we want to say about that?
I think the main thing that we want to say about that, is that it doesn't take account,
nowhere does it take account, of the effects of this and many other technologies on the capacity
of governments to govern. On the capacity of politicians, or members of governments, members
of institutions of all kinds, to fulfill their function as an authority or as a regulator,
and for those institutions to function well.
And so that there's a contradiction in what Sam Altman is saying,
unless we believe that he is capable of thinking through the consequences, on what we would call
noesis, thinking, as a result of these technologies.
And this is obviously where Bernard Stiegler is crucial for us,
and why I said that the real question of AI is denoetisation,
which is what he talks about in The Immense Regression.
So now let's look at some quotations in order to say...
(so this is the second part of the talk, I don't know how I'm doing for time but...)
...What (if we go right to the end of this quotation) we can see that Stiegler is raising this issue
in terms of the idea that the first to be struck are utterly rootless members of the elites.
In other words these kind of, I think he means, first in line these kinds of
Silicon Valley billionaires and innovators and disruptors, and so on, are themselves the victims
of what in most of his books he calls proletarianization, which I won't explain
for you, because I'm sure you all know, but to put it as quickly as possible, is the
notion that the different kinds of memory technology can aid in memory and knowledge
and thinking, but also can destroy it.
Where this quote here, "the first to be struck are utterly rootless members of the elites"
is obviously a kind of variation on the quotation from the Communist Manifesto that Stiegler
often liked to refer to that proletarianisation will affect all layers of the population,
eventually affect all layers of the population, including governments.
Now, he also refers in this quotation to "average qualities without men".
"Qualities without men" obviously is a reference here to Robert Musil's book,
Man Without Qualities, which is discussed a lot in this in The Immense Regression,
and to think about that let's think for a moment about: why does Bernard Stiegler talk about entropy?
Just give ourselves one minute to think about that.
Entropy, although it was not known at the time of the formulation of the concept
by the time of Boltzmann, is understood to mean a probabilistic tendency of the universe,
probabilistic tendency in other words for things to level out towards their
averages over time in a way that means that the past tends to be erased.
To say that the past tends to be erased, is to say that the improbable tends to
be eliminated by the probable.
And the improbable that we're talking about here is not an improbability,
of a very small probability, it doesn't mean a very small probability.
It means something singular.
Something that could not have been deduced, from the set of probable becomings.
And before the event, such as life.
And that where this improbable happens, it happens as a history that unfolds.
As a dynamic process in other words.
That that never undoes, and never can defeat, entropy and therefore can only ever be a temporally and spatially
local process.
Why does Stiegler want to add the terms anthropy and neganthropy to entropy and negentropy?
He wants to add these terms because there is a new kind of probabilistic tendency
that arises when life becomes exosomatic.
That new probabilistic tendency is what becomes possible with the calculative processes
that go through tools and machines, and make possible new kinds of leveling, new kinds of averages,
new kinds of forgetting of the past, erasing of the past, by this, by the averaging of life.
And this is what Robert Musil is talking about in the man without qualities
when he discusses Kakania [Ed.: Austrian writer Robert Musil coined the term Kakania to describe
the irony and absurdity of the highly bureaucratic Habsburg Empire]
But, as Stiegler analyzes in that book, Musil's limitation is to want to think
how probabilities can be put to use, but without him having the ability to think the improbable itself.
In other words the singularity of localized life for us, cultural singularity, cultural locality,
and so on.
And that nevertheless we can look to Musil in order to see this diagnosis of the
leveling by averages, and understand that this is what's unfolding for us today,
but in a much more powerful way that Musil could never have imagined,
where what is really singular is noesis itself.
That is our capacity for thinking and caring, and so on
And that when this is undone, Stiegler says, we have a proliferation of stupidity and
madness and the question of denoetization, is a question of the industrial use of
retentions (of tertiary retentions, that is the traces that we leave),
the industrial use of retentions for the control of protentions (that is dreams, desires, anticipations,
and so on.
Alright.
And the way in which AI is a step, and ChatGPT for example is a step,
in that process of producing an industrial noetic desert based on analysis of texts
that themselves increasingly will be automated, and which have all kinds of other biases and so on,
One of one of the better analysts of this in my view is Anne Alombert, is somebody you probably
all know, in this kind of paper, and also in her book that she published last year and which will be published
in an excellent English translation next year, to be titled Digital Schizophrenia.
Okay, back to Bernard.
So to put this another way, as you know, Bernard loves the phrase doubly epokhal redoubling.
Where the idea there is that life unfolds as, exosomatic life unfolds as, a constant
advance and delay of a two-step process.
The first is a disruption that occurs to the technical system,
that throws existing ways of taking care of life in that system,
and taking care of that system, into a disruption
Which requires a renewal of those other systems ("other systems" being a phrase he takes from
Bertrand Gille) and that this renewal of those other systems, cultural systems, social systems,
in turn produces changes gradually in the technical system eventually leading
to further disruptions, or another tool is invented that changes the basis of
the technical system, and so on.
But for this to be possible requires us to have the knowledge
and the care, to be able to take care in new improbable ways
It's a question of new improbabilities.
And so what he's diagnosing, as the threat of denoetization,
where these kind -- all of our thinking for Bernard as you know, all of our thinking
is possible only because it is in a circuit, with the tools that we have, and especially
with the memory tools that we have.
But at the same time, if the speed and the power of those tools
is used in a way that systematically controls protentions in advance of our ability to think
about them or take care of them, then this seems to be a double threat, not only a disruption of
the technical system but a disruption of our ability to respond to those changes.
And so this second moment becomes impossible, which he describes as it "no longer being
possible to effect bifurcations" where bifurcations are also, he says in this same book,
another name for what in the past used to be called miracles.
Alright.
Of course it is not news to anybody here, that what we're talking about,
when it's no longer possible for good care to be taken of the pharmakon
by the pharmakon, then this is the moment at which it becomes inevitable that there will
be a search for the pharmakos (that is for the scapegoat) and this is why Stiegler called
the scapegoat "the third dimension of pharmacology".
When we're no longer in a position -- when we're not able -- when we don't succeed
in taking care of the pharmakon, in other words we have problems brought about by our use of technology
that we don't manage to find new improbable solutions to, or good solutions to, neganthropic solutions,
then we begin to look for a scapegoat.
And this becomes, in the 20th century, the rise of populism.
And this continues as you know in the 21st century, and many people
understand that there is a connection between this kind of very powerful use of network effects
and memetic effects, and their tendency to produce forms of political expression
that are dependent on searching for scapegoats.
And which are usually characterized as far-right populism.
Obviously this is the case.
This is the type of stupidity and madness that we face today.
At the same time, I think it's necessary to remember that in his diagnosis of post-truth,
and the relation it has to fake news, alternative facts, and the like,
what Stiegler wanted to say as well is that responses to this kind of phenomenon
that are intended as responses in the name of not scapegoating,
very often have a scapegoating character about them.
And one of the reasons for that is because they themselves, these kinds of responses themselves,
forget that facts are never simply a question of being laid out without requiring interpretation
so responses of the kind like fact-checking sites, are based on a kind of wish to be
to be anti-scapegoating in some way, but in the end are themselves a kind of denial
and madness that denies the necessity of interpretation of life.
And so they themselves are a symptom.
(I'm moving through a little bit faster than what I wanted but I think it's necessary)
Now here I just will say that this kind of use of AI, Stiegler's diagnosis
is also in terms of the four causes (Aristotle's four causes) in which what's going on
is that there is a hegemony of the efficient cause.
The efficient cause dominates over all other causes,
and especially over final causes.
In a way, what Stiegler is saying is that the renewal of the possibility of improbabilities depends
on us believing once again in the possibility of final causes.
And that when we don't believe in final causes,
when we don't believe that there are aims, beyond correlations,
which turn us into "qualities without men" in his terms,
then we get into a very bad mood, as he says, an extremely bad mood.
Because, where there are no ends, then we have a feeling that the end is coming.
This is a powerful thought, I believe.
His way of expressing it here, replaced by correlations of averages, leading to the
hypertrophy of efficient causes. Hypertrophy as in, it's too much, you know it's the
over-exaggeration of efficient causes.
Purely computational capitalism exerts absolute hegemony over the material cause,
by controlling the criteria for selecting new exosomatic possibilities.
It is the calculation of averages and the generation of qualities without men that are the effective reality of this
efficiency, the price of which is literally exorbitant.
What does he mean by literally there?
I think what he means is that it's like he's connecting it to the satellite belt,
it's outside the orbit of the earth, as the basis.
And what he's talking about here is really Gestell as well, in this way he's really
agreeing with Heidegger, even if he's also disagreeing with Heidegger at the same time.
Alright, now what I want to say is, of course, when you look even at this we know
that for Stiegler it's crucial to say that this process of proletarianization, of denoetization,
does not start with AI, it does not start with platform capitalism, it does not start with
digitalization or the internet, it does not even start with industrialization,
but industrialization is when proletarianization becomes systematic.
Because industrialization is the generalization of a process of taking control
of the programming of the gestures of workers,
which in the 20th century is followed by the industrialization of the audiovisual realm with
radio and cinema and television which proletarianized ways of life (culture).
So these have long roots but what I want to say now is that it also goes back further than that.
But we have to think about the roots of denoetization also from a much longer perspective.
Denoetization is the new banality of evil.
You know that phrase from Arendt.
Which manifests itself in the first place as ill-being, as the bad mood.
In the confusion between being and the single god,
which in the Nietzschean genealogy is the concretization of nihilism,
but which announces itself well before Christianity, in other words Christianity concretizes
this but it even starts before Christianity in the sense for Stiegler it starts for instance
in the hinge from Socrates to Plato, as he explains in the Nanjing lectures
(which you should all read if you haven't),
especially the 2017 lectures, because there you will find what he's saying about Plato and
Socrates, that would have gone into one of the later volumes of Technics and Time, but he never published
that volume, but you can find a lot of that material in his 2017 Nanjing lectures.
And which he mentions elsewhere but that's where you should look at it.
There formed the oppositions of the True and the False on the one hand, and of Good and Evil
on the other hand. And in such a way that they are then inflected into the opposition of Being
and Becoming, which is thus reconfigured within ontotheology, as the Good and Being, and Evil
and Becoming.
In other words Good and Being are associated on one hand side and Evil and
Becoming are associated on the other side.
There's two things to say here.
One is that this is a question of the difference between a compositional philosophy and an oppositional
philosophy.
The history of metaphysics is an oppositional philosophy and its roots go back
to Plato.
Compositional philosophy knows that all oppositions start from originary composition.
The second thing to say here is that what Stiegler is telling us
is that the question of denoetization is not just a question of truth in terms of
something like logic (formalization of thinking), it's a question of morality.
It's a question of care, it's a question of evil, it's a question of morality.
But remembering that for Stiegler, Evil is not the opposite of Good, it's a composition.
And that's why he goes to goes on to say immediately that the history of truth
as Heidegger diagnosed as Heidegger described it and the genealogy of morality
as Nietzsche described it are inseparable.
And the question of post-truth, which we might think is a question of AI today,
is also and first of all a question of this inseparability of the history of truth
and genealogy of morality, in their becoming undone by these technologies.
But the roots of this denoetization go back this far.
Now why do I want to say something about that?
I want to say something about it because I think
it's important for us to remember how Stiegler thinks about this connection
of truth and morality, which can seem like a very old-fashioned word.
And is a very old-fashioned, if not obsolete word.
But when you think about it through nature it's not at all obsolete.
Why is it necessary for us?
Because, first of all, above all, what we learn from the myth of Prometheus
is that technics is a possibility of falling into war.
So let's move on.
And war is what can happen when, or being incapable of taking care of the pharmakon,
we begin to look for scapegoats.
And revenge.
Now what I want to say is, it is true that Stiegler was extremely concerned
with far-right populism: the stupidity and madness of the elites.
But it's also true that when it comes to that stupidity and madness,
what he always said is that we first have to deal with the stupidity in ourselves.
And in my view now is a time when we have to remember to deal with the stupidity in ourselves
first of all.
And we have to deal with the stupidity in ourselves first of all because
we too are the ones who fall into a thinking in terms of oppositions.
Of Being and the Good, and of Becoming and Evil.
And what do we learn from the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus?
We learned that Hermes, as Stiegler always reminded us, sent two primordial affects (affects of affects)
with which we human beings have the possibility of trying to negotiate peace.
Rather than falling into war.
And those two primordial affects are dikaios and aidos, in other words
justice and shame.
The main thing that I want to say is that means not just justice.
Justice or in other words we could say the feeling of injustice.
Justice, the feeling of injustice, is absolutely fundamental and necessary according to
this myth, but it's not all that is fundamental and necessary.
We also need shame, and shame means the possibility of not forgetting the
the stupidity and the madness in ourselves.
In our tendency to fall into oppositions.
In our tendency to want to look for the scapegoat, to want to find some scapegoat because
we are infected by the spirit of revenge, that is by resentment and denial.
Those very things that Bernard [Stiegler] referred to on the back page of the French edition of
Technics and Time 1.
And why do I say that now?
Because well, when the last time I got to talk to some of you people,
is already some time ago now, was in Paris, and there as well I tried to say something about war.
At that time things were different but what I wanted to say then is that
war and peace are not opposites in the sense that peace is some kind of idyllic state.
Peace means the capacity to live in tension.
In the tension of noetic life and in the tension of collective life.
The capacity to avoid war, or to bring war to an end, depends not on
"cease fire" as a kind of non-violent state,
but on cultivating the knowledge and the desire
to live within tension.
And so to just continue with this example that I'm giving,
of course this story is extremely complicated,
and there are many perspectives and points of view.
But if we wish to protest about sufferings that exist and are ongoing, it is nevertheless also
incumbent upon us to remember that the future is more important than the past.
And if for example what you want to do is to say that a country of 10 million people,
a nation of 10 million people, 2 million of whom are arabs,
should not exist, then you should also ask yourselves whether what you're doing
is making it possible to bring about peace, as the capacity to live with tension,
or whether what you're doing is to make life into a permanent war.
And whether what you're doing is reflective of an approach to life that is compositional or oppositional.
And whether what you're doing is attempting to reason,
about possible futures, or succumb to the madness and stupidity of looking
for a scapegoat, because you don't know how to deal with the pharmakon.
And where, just to make one last observation, there are already apps that are dedicated
to saying "this app will tell you what not to purchase if you want to have this kind of
outcome".
But of course where this kind of thought about this kind of app is never
interpreted in terms of what it means about this particular kind of pharmakon.
But it ought to be.
So I'll leave it at that, I think I've taken more than enough time
