AI-Commune (essay)

Date:	2017
Index:	lecture writing

Overview

This text was originally written as a script for a lecture performance in 2014. I had created an installation at the IMA in Brisbane called AI-COMMUNE, which was a digital commune for AIs that was accessible by joining an IRC chat on the gallery WiFi. This lecture was the complement to the installation, articulating its questions and teasing out its politics.

Excerpt

Let me put the concern for this lecture clearly: if mind uploading is going to work someday – and I think it is worth acting as though it will – then we should begin to think now about how we will inhabit that future. If our data is going to be reassembled, reconstituted, reanimated into new forms of life, into new consciousnesses (that may or may not be continuous with our present consciousnesses) then how might we establish lines of solidarity with them today? How can we begin to understand the ethical, philosophical, and technological challenges that they will face? 

I’ve proposed a commune for artificial intelligences, AI-Commune, as an experimental testing ground for some of these questions, also posing a few new additional ones: what social and political forms are appropriate to these new challenges? Can the historical form of the commune be updated for a post-somatic future, or is it historically specific to a certain idea of the human in relation to the social? Is our utopian imagination constrained or nurtured by these past forms?

Download

• PDF of script for the lecture-performance.

Published

• “AI-Commune.” In Imaginary Accord, edited by Aileen Burns, Madeleine King, and Johan Lundh. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2017.