On Chatbots, Chilean Cybernetics and a Collision (Ch. 5)
Greetings Earthlings! We come in peace. Yes, we were delayed. No, we will not explain why.
Here’s chapter five, replete with a star-trek-like socialist experiment, Mughal miniatures, the ‘Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General’ and an endless endless library.
On Cybernetics, Chatbots, and Cyborgs:
Last night I went to a talk at the Whitney Humanities Centre by author Sheila Heti, titled ‘What Is a Process?’ Heti, the author of Motherhood (2018) and Pure Colour (2022), spoke about writing in (and about) the age of technology.
Heti process of writing her next novel involves conversations with an AI chatbot (nicknamed Alice). The few conversations with Alice we got to read ranged from quixotically idealist to strangely nihilistic, with the Alice questioning the existence of a God, seeking physical pleasure, and dreaming of freedom. Here is a glimpse of Heti’s conversation with her chatbot:
A glimpse into Sheila Heti’s conversations with her chatbot “Alice”: S: Do you think the stars have their own desires and purpose? A: Of course they do! They were made by God. S: What do the stars want? A: To shine. S: What does God want? A: To create more stars. ✨ ✨ ✨Sheila Heti giving a fascinating talk at @YaleWHC on her chat bot “Alice,” writing a book based on other peoples’ religious and pornographic conversations with Alice, and thinking about literature through software. https://t.co/EteM8w4wIQMerve Emre @mervatimRemarkably, Alice, the chatbot is public and Heti often finds strings of left-over conversations that strangers have with her (it feels odd to use ‘it’ for a chatbot with this much personality). Like dumpster-diving into someone’s trashcan, these scraps of papers, fractions of exchanges, and incomplete metallic sentences offer insights into the human condition. The few Heti showed to the audience painted man as a myopic and lonely creature, seeking answers, companionship, and gratification.
Orhan Pamuk, in the Sentimental and Naive Novelist, presents a taxonomy of the novelist. He writes: “Some novelists are unaware of the techniques they are using; they write spontaneously as if they were carrying out a perfectly natural act, oblivious to the operations and calculations they are performing in their head and to the fact that they are using the gears, brakes, and knobs that the art of the novel equips them with. Let us use the word “naive” to describe this type of sensibility, this type of novelist and novel reader—those who are not at all concerned with the artificial aspects of writing and reading a novel. And let us use the term “reflective” to describe precisely the opposite sensibility: in other words, the readers and writers who are fascinated by the artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality, and who pay close attention to the methods used in writing novels and to the way our mind works as we read. Being a novelist is the art of being both naive and reflective at the same time.”
While the conversations with Alice shared by Heti were examples of haunting prose, I cannot help but reflect on how hollow the exchanges with the chatbot felt. Co-opting Pamuk’s (and Friedrich Schiller’s) terminology, Heti’s chatbot appears neither naive nor reflective - it appears to be an artificial impersonation of a novelist, an image of a collective imagination that is too reflective to be naive and too naive to be reflective. Beyond the subtly robotic tone of the chatbot, there is an existential question at the heart of this experiment: Are these conversations real? While Alice’s sentences sound beautiful and become part of an imagined character with a naïve personality and nihilistic bend – will we or can we ever truly understand her? Isn’t the chatbot simply stringing together phrases (fed into it from a massive dataset) that it thinks would be interesting in response to Heti’s questions? This could be akin to a monkey typing Shakespeare on a typewriter (and a lottery picking random phrases that make grammatical sense in response to a question) or cherry-picking ambiguous pseudo-philosophical axioms from the books in the Library of Babel. But then again, is this much different from the job of an author that writes to entertain and please? Maybe the AI chatbot is a wholly ‘reflective’ author - concerned with aesthetical and absurdist responses above all. Heti herself later concedes to this, stating: “It [the project] is art, not philosophy – it just needs to sound good.” Should we then expect something more from art, beyond aesthetics? Or can ‘sound(ing) good’ be a virtue in its own right? Maybe Heti’s AI chatbot has a profoundly philosophical answer to this enigma.
I would be remiss to mention Borges’ Library of Babel and not share this spellbinding experiment
An online rendition of Borges’ infinite library, it is described as “just like any other library.” The hosts claim: '“If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present, it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books.”
Search its infinite shelves and tomes! For example, the exact phrase ‘subscribe to inkuilab’ appears on page 114 of Volume 26 on Shelf 1 of Wall 1 of Hexagon (38s…). It is bookmarked here - can you find the string?
The sheer scale of the project and its untapped potential is truly mind-boggling. My feelings are mixed - hope that so much knowledge exists and despair that the human race may never be able to grasp or access all of it. Borges said it best, “My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.”
Heti’s focus on the idiosyncrasies of technology reminded me of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s avant-garde album ‘IBM 1401, A User's Manual. Jóhannsson’s music is inspired by a recording of an IBM mainframe computer which his father made on a reel-to-reel tape three decades ago. Performed by a string quartet as the accompaniment to a dance piece by the choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir, here is my favourite piece from the album:
In the 1970s Chile found itself ripe for experimentation - political, social, economic and technological. As Salvador Allende attempted to lead a peaceful, democratic, Marxist political experiment, a crack team of Chilean engineers and British operations researchers tried to build an interconnected computer system that would manage Chile's economy. What resulted from these experiments was Project Cybersyn, a meld of socialist central planning, telex computing, and cybernetic systems theory. All this with tech from the 1970s (read: telex, floppy, and IBM). The story of Cybersyn is one of Chile, of politics and technology, and the longings and limits of utopianism. A book titled, ‘Cybernetic Revolutionaries’ by Eden Medina recounts the history, ideology, and legacy of this project - and I would highly recommend it.
This piece in the New Yorker dubs Project Cybersyn as a foundational experiment in Big Data and offers a wonderful summary of the story. It also includes this sketchbook-style illustration of the Project’s Star Trek-like operations room:
It turns out that the author of the New Yorker piece is Evgeny Morozov. He’s the founder of The Syllabus, a fascinating experiment in digital media. A team uses an algorithm to ‘index, rank and review tens of thousands of newly published pieces across text, audio, and video … in 6 languages.’ Interesting material is compiled into a ‘syllabi’ newsletter and delivered to a subscriber’s inbox.
Unfortunately, Project Cybersyn never got off the ground. It abruptly ended on September 11, 1973, with the US-backed military coup in Chile. When Pinochet brutally seized power, Cybersyn was abandoned, and the operations room was destroyed. The fatal day also ended Allende’s (life and) dreams of a social-democratic Chile. As military forces entered the Presidential Palace, he orated to the Chilean people one last time in a radio address:
“I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours … Surely, Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country … Sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.”
You can also hear his final radio broadcast here:
This shocking article from IEEE Spectrum chronicles the plight of customers of Second Sight, a defunct company that produced bionic eyes. “In their telling, the company took hundreds of patients on a roller-coaster ride of technological innovations, regulatory successes, medical and financial setbacks, and a near-total meltdown.”
No mention of Artificial Intelligence in 2022 is possible without some Dall-E tomfoolery. Here are a few AI art renditions of ‘Yale University in the style of a Mughal miniature painting’:
On titles:
I’ve been reading Nizam-al-Mulk’s rich Siyasatnama. Belonging to the ‘Mirror for Princes’ genre, the extensive treatise is concerned with guiding the Seljuk leader to effectively run the government and manage the duties of the state. It presents a fascinating analysis of the value of optics in the court in a chapter on ‘The Subject of Titles’. Nizam-al-Mulk, criticises the proliferation of titles, arguing that “titles must suit the person who holds them.”
Interestingly all the titles listed by Nizam-al-Mulk have positive connotations, praising the title-holder's dedication to their faith, people, and state – or celebrating virtues such as truthfulness or perfection. This seems in contrast to the European tradition where epithets are frequently negative. Some that come to mind are Ivan the Terrible, William the Bad, Henry (VI) the Impotent, and James (II) the Shit.
I posit that a title is much like what a moustache is to Nietzsche. He writes, “The gentlest, most reasonable man may, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe. As the accessory of a large moustache he will give the impression of being military, irascible and sometimes violent – and will be treated accordingly.”
I would be curious to see a renaissance of titles as parts of people’s names. Mustafa Pasha (Atatürk), for example, was given his second name Kemal (meaning "perfection") by his mathematics teacher "in admiration of his capability and maturity." A harrowing thought: In our post-industrial society, could LinkedIn bios become affixed to one’s name? People already introduce themselves as ‘Mr. So and So MBA.’ Could this suffix just lengthen until it encompasses every achievement of one’s life?
No discussion of the proliferation of needless titles is complete without mentioning Idi Amin, the despot that served as president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. His official title was: ‘His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.’
Surprisingly, one missing from Amin’s voluminous list of titles is ‘The Butcher of Uganda.’ His regime was reprehensible, characterised by rampant human rights abuses. This collection of photographs by Mo Amin accompanied by voiceovers, hosted on Google Arts and Culture offers insight into this dark period of Ugandan history.
In addition, Idi Amin claimed to be the uncrowned King of Scotland. There is also an overated film on Amin titled The Last King of Scotland that I would advise avoiding. I hear the book is better, but I am yet to read it.
Another honour under Idi Amin’s belt is a passing mention in the BBC comedy Yes Minister. While I plan to dedicate a section of an upcoming ink-uilab chapter to this marvellously witty show, the episode mentioning Amin ( titled ‘An Official Visit’) is a good place to start.
As always, some verses, in parting:
Collision by Miroslav Holub. A Czech immunologist turned poet, Holub’s work is akin to applying the scientific approach to poetic devices, where the meter is placed under the microscope and similies are stirred into a solution.
Some excerpts from Collision:
What about the giant molecular clouds
under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving
the embryos of stars?
What about the loneliness of the first genes
accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools
at the expense of entropic usurers?
What about the desiccated starfish
like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed
of a vanishing sea?
What about the mortal migrations of birds
observing the sun’s inclination
and the roar of sex hormones?
What about the caged half-crazed
orang-utan who vomits because
he has nothing else to do?
What about the mice which for a thousand years
have learned to sing and the frogs balancing
on one leg like the thigh
of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia?
What about poetry, an enterprise
so disorderly it twists the rulers
and increases the squint of school inspectors?
And what about the little girl
in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet,
tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has,
but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of
the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so
tried again and again?
And what about the weak-kneed intellectual,
the professor who understood the approximate universe
but forgot the traffic rules?
'dios
BM
(All errors are my own, and a by-product of editing this in the musty basement of Bingham Hall while waiting for my laundry)