<nettime> on Hybrid Systems

["Konrad Becker" <konrad@world-information.org>]

Follow up on colonizing the future: investigating the logic of hybrid
systems. "While boundaries between people, machines and animals blur,
intelligences proliferate creating monstrous confusion - it feeds into
existential dread and opens up space for reactionary politics but also
radical visions of different futures."

Cheers, ~>K


https://world-information.net/hybrid/

Hypernormal Hybrids 10.11. 2017  A Report on Hybrid Systems 

As Felix Stalder (World-Information Institute) explains, the event
continues, a series that explores how algorithmic decision-making systems
are increasingly permeating various aspects of our culture and everyday
life. The series began in 2015 with the conference ?Algorithmic Regimes?, in
which various areas ? from the health to urban planning and crime prevention
? were investigated on how they deal with these systems. In the follow-up
project ?Painted by Numbers? the format of a video installation was used to
present interviews in a way that creates a polyphonic collage that cannot be
reduced to one perspective. The installation accompanied the event set up in
the foyer and bar. To be many voiced is the specificity of the series, which
does not want to present a certain perspective, but sets in motion a variety
of perspectives in a transdisciplinary setting. This is also the case in
?Hypernormal Hybrids?, where a central theme is the concept of
?intelligence?.

In the first part moderated by Christian Höller (Springerin, Vienna), S.M.
Amadae (University of Helsinki and Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
uses the rationality paradigms of rational choice and game theory as well as
information theory, computability and quantum thermodynamics to explore the
profound links between ?information revolution? and neoliberalism. In this
context, human intelligence is as it were approximated to the concept of
artificial intelligence, reduced to a physical status of the brain, and thus
practically eliminating both the reference to meaning and the element of
freedom. After an intervention by Konrad Becker (World-Information
Institute), which focused on invisible algorithms and systems to control
decisions and provided a larger associative context to S.M. Amadae, the
second part deals with the two forms of intelligence that, are most evident
alongside those of humanity: artificial intelligence and the intelligence of
animals.

Stefan Woltran (Vienna University of Technology) gives a brief overview of
current concepts of artificial intelligence and illustrates their practical
limitations by means of image recognition. A look at the achievements of AI
in the field of games (a series of victories by artificial intelligences
over the respective World Champions from Checkers to Chess as early as the
mid-1990s to Go in 2016) results in a rejection of the interpretations often
employed in mass media. These programs are very specialized ? for example,
you could not use the Go-computer in Chess ? and the goal would be ?General
Artificial Intelligence?, but we are still a long way from realizing it.
More important than fantasies about the future is dealing with the immediate
dangers, especially with regard to the impact on the labor market, AI in
weapons and the problem that biased data leads to biased AI.

In her contribution, Susana Monsó (University of Veterinary Medicine,
Vienna) focuses on the problem that research on the intelligence of animals
always uses human forms of intelligence as a benchmark. It thus classifies
animals on a scale that runs from zero to human intelligence ? while
specific forms such as animal instincts are usually considered inferior.
Monsó juxtaposes examples of mainstream experiments on speech understanding
and tool use with specific animal forms of intelligence: on the memory
skills of birds, who in winter easily find the seeds hidden in hundreds of
places in the summer before, or the collective intelligence of bees and
ants. She raises the question, whether a constructed superiority of humans
could be called into question by other criteria, such as the sheer
survivability. Then Tardigrades would be far superior, which can survive not
only 30 years without food and water, but also, among other things, survive
to be frozen or cooked, or easily endure the hundredfold lethal amount of
radioactivity for humans. The relationship between animal and human is also
modeled in research by opposing attitudes: either by the search for the
uniqueness of man and thus the fundamental differences with the animals, or
on the contrary by the search for the similarities.

The event does not remain in just one dimension of argument. The theoretical
examination is broadened by an artistic one, which adds the practice of a
positive form of human-machine interaction to the criticism of their
neoliberal deformation. This begins with the aforementioned polyphony of the
video installation in foyer and bar, continues in Konrad Becker?s
intervention, in which sound and fast image sequence structure the rhythm of
thought, and screenings, which include excerpts from Adam Curtis?
documentary. ?Hypernormalisation? or to the Nigerian afro-futuristic no
budget film? The Day they Came?.

The second part of the evening is taken over by this layer of investigation.
Boris Kopeinig, an artist associated with World- Information Institute and
its predecessor projects for a long time, kicks off a lineup of electronic
performances. His sound is accompanied by a video stream of infinite series
of numbers. Anyone who follows the link to his website for the event in the
program will only find enigmatic signs. Without explanation, they seem like
links, but when you click on them they disappear, to only leave a blank
screen behind.

Napalm Tree, a duo that has started their performances at art spaces and in
small clubs in Vienna, is a highlight of the evening. While one of the duo
is present live on stage, the other, with her video image towards to the
auditorium, is connected via Skype from Dakar. In a hybrid space with
digital gadgets, voice and remote communications they entrance audiences in
a subtle mix of soulful machine noises. It was followed by ca.tter & mstep,
active in their joint project ?55orondy?, with solid abstract grooves and
rare bionic beats, and a set by DJ Plak, a pioneer of electronic bass music
in Vienna.

If one tries to identify some of the central points of the event, then first
of all the detailed presentation of the connection between ?information
revolution? and neoliberalism in the lecture of S.M. Amadae needs to be
mentioned. Amadae has worked extensively on Rational Choice theory and game
theory in her book ?Prisoners of Reason,? published in 2015. Starting from
three godfathers of computer science ? Claude Shannon, John von Neumann and
Alan Turing, in ?whose vision of the future we are now living in?, Amadae
says  ? it shows step by step the interlocking of several aspects:
quantification, algorithmic processing, reduction of information to the
processing of symbols, and in addition the medium money, which, as a
generalized measure, takes over the succession of energy / heat from the
physical models followed by neoliberal ones.

Amadae?s overall assessment is bleak: ?This rationality paradigm begins to
define and limit our world and the possibilities we have in it. We live in
an information age, but the meaning is lost; we live in a world of
computation, but intelligibility is lost; and the quantum revolution should
actually broaden our possibilities, but the opposite is happening.? So the
question of resistance arises. Amadae, who fundamentally argues on a narrow
line when she opposes neo-liberalism with the values of liberal democracy,
does not present a political strategy, but advocates insisting on values
that become most tangible when Amadae confronts alternatives to the
paradigms mentioned above. Such as the view that communication conveys
symbols devoid of meaning, to a concept of communication that refers to
interpretable meaning. Or the concept that considers any uncertainty to be
quantifiable vs. the possibility of absolute unpredictability.

One problem is the ever-growing inequalities in knowledge production.
Research projects make great efforts to build up counter-expertise in the
sense of Amadae?s work but are hardly able to work continuously in a
university landscape that is increasingly geared towards exclusively
equipping students with market-compliant skills. A similar problem is
addressed in the discussion with Stefan Woltran: If private sector actors
such as Google are not only able to offer researchers the best conditions,
but also have huge databases that are not accessible to university research,
it is hardly possible for the latter to keep up with them.

The event has succeeded in shedding light on the intelligences of the
Hypernormal Hybrids ? their autonomy and specificity as well as their
relationships and dependencies. The decidedly transdisciplinary approach and
the dramaturgy, which placed a performance in the middle of the discursive
parts and thereby strengthened associative thinking, prevented disparities
from disappearing by being re-contextualized. The topic is thus exposed and
open to future steps of broadening as well as deepening individual aspects.

a World-Information Institute event in cooperation with springerin magazine

Hypernormal Hybrids Video (14')
https://world-information.net/hh-the-video/

Prisoners of Reason - S. M. Amadae,  Video (66') 
https://world-information.net/prisoners-of-reason/

Hypernormal Hybrids: springerin magazine, Issue 1/2018, "Asoziale Medien?"

Hypernormal Hybrids 10.11. 2017  |    https://world-information.net/hybrid/

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