Our Sociomaterial Entanglement with AI

Contrary to the frenzy of hyperbolic rhetoric preaching artificial intelligence (AI) as an economic imperative for nations, the way it is entangled with all aspects of our lives calls for inquiry into its meaning beyond a passive prop whose affordances unfold as we handle it. This view does not offer much beyond AI’s existence as a carrier of meaning within the symbolic orders that make our world. Instead, one might muse on the way AI “compute” – the domestic computational power AI developers train to generate new content from vast amounts of data –reproduces our “real” via simulated models. These models are contingent upon how well the simulation process is trained, and therefore, their output is a mere copy that supersedes, displaces, replaces and thereby anticipates our real.

What we share with AI is no longer our entanglement; we are parts of a simulation that permeates and makes our relationship with AI possible. The simulation escapes the entrenched Cartesian divide of subject and object by modeling our encounters with AI as a complex mixture of signs and interactions. It bypasses the dualistic relationship of the human and technology as a matter of cause and effect to impose another connector. A nondeterministic inclination, a generative tendency toward an ideal form that connects us with AI.

Limiting the real to what happens reinstigates the possibility of life into the mind and does not account for how this mind could have emerged out of simulation, nor does it account for how it relates to the simulation process. AI-generated real does not occur in the mind, nor is it imposed by it. It is a form that proliferates to an unprecedented degree in all directions. Form here is not synonymous of structure or domain but is a process of pattern production and propagation whose innate generative logic comes to permeate us as we harness it. This form is neither cognitive nor material. It is an absential pattern that results from constraints on possibility. It is immaterial, invisible and constitutive of the simulation process, akin to the wheel metaphor of Lao Tzu that is useful thanks to the hole at its hub. It is the constitutive absence at the hub of the wheel, delimited by its spokes, that causes all the practices of the wheel. AI organizes data into a certain form of patterns, although the actual pattern data will be an outcome of the interaction of data and the human-monitored analytical variables.

An office space organizes workers into the general form of a workshop, though the actual workshop will be a response to the interaction between the office space and the conditions imposed by the participants. An office space is as much about what is inside the walls as it is about the absence they delimit. So certain practices depend on what the office space is as much as all excluded absences it is not. These absences are akin to the dog’s silence that helped Sherlock Holmes solve the mystery of the racehorse that had disappeared. During the investigation, the inspector asked Holmes whether there was anything that drew his attention, to which Holmes replied, “The curious incident of the dog.”
The inspector replied, “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident … I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog for one true inference invariably suggests to others … obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

Form propagates itself through the human and affects the logic of our lives from within, and accessing it requires entering the logic of these patterns. For instance, the “compute” data falls into form when aggregated from its unstructured messiness, yet aggregated data flows into activities to point to reality beyond them, at the price of compromising the rich and complex distributive data that high abstraction overlooks and therefore conveys dubious descriptions of reality. Seeing distributive data does not imply a shift of perspective but the ability to see form “twice” – for both aggregate and distributive data are two dimensions of the same entity: One is the inside of the other; either explains the other.

Therefore, the phenomenon at hand is not “outside,” that is, endemic to our encounters with AI, but is inherently “inside” the absent patterns of its compute. If we were to display in front of us all the patterns generated by AI applications and were to make a sketch of the forms generated by the holes between these patterns, we could enact a new figure made by the absent shapes that the spaces between the patterns have generated.

These absent shapes are where we should start our inquiry into the status of AI in shaping all aspects of our lives.