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Sha Xin Wei: Thought or algorithm? Gesture or mechanism? Organism or golem

Keynote for  Tacit Engagement in the Digital Age 2024: The Magic Machine, Through the Prism of Art and Science.

19-20 September 2024 | Faculty of Music, Cambridge University

Jointly sponsored by AI & Society Journal and the Center for Music and Science

Abstract:  An LLM’s hallucinations demonstrate the larger fact that any token-based, pattern-classification or pattern-generation algorithm merely makes syntactic arrangements of tokens bearing a strictly indeterminate association with lived occasion, place or experience; in short they are “stochastic parrots.”  More deeply still, any representational scheme cannot but miss what Michel Polanyi has called tacit knowledge, which is *not* represented in any form – language, number, equations, or diagrams.  Dancing, cooking, playing music, athletics, but also laboratory, engineering, and business practices are full of such tacit knowledges.

Nonetheless, we tend to see faces in clouds, and not infrequently, intention in a set of mechanically juxtaposed events.  The former psychologists call apophenia.  The latter we call AI agency.  Now, while magical thinking can lubricate our social lives, we might pause to ask — given that the “A” in “AI” often means automation — who benefits and who suffers when we replace human thinking, gesturing, interpreting by mechanical procedure?

Rather than rest content with a negative critique, however, I will sketch some calibrated, positive uses of technology, alternative to automation, in the equally ancient spirit of augmentation, as ancient as fire and bone flutes.  These alternatives construe technologies as augmenting rather than replacing thought, gesture, life.  They draw from and motivate different ways of making, doing, and sense-making that recognize and in fact rely on relationality, texturality, nuance, multiplicity, indeterminacy, and the open-ended historicity of life.