Spy on Me #2 – Artistic Manoevres for the Digital Present
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Spy on Me Artistic Manoeuvres for the Digital Present #2 19. –29.3.2020 Spy on Me #2 – Artistic Manoeuvres for the Digital Present 19.–29.3.2020 / HAU1, HAU2, HAU3 We have arrived in the reality of digital transformation. Life with screens, apps and algorithms influences our behaviour, our atten - tion and desires. Meanwhile the idea of the public space and of democracy is being reorganized by digital means. The festival “Spy on Me” goes into its second round after 2018, searching for manoeuvres for the digital present together with Berlin-based and international artists. Performances, interactive spatial installati - ons and discursive events examine the complex effects of the digi - tal transformation of society. In theatre, where live encounters are the focus, we come close to the intermediate spaces of digital life, searching for ways out of feeling powerless and overwhelmed, as currently experienced by many users of internet-based technolo - gies. For it is not just in some future digital utopia, but here, in the midst of this present, that we have to deal with the basic conditi - ons of living together as a society and of planetary survival. Are we at the edge of a great digital darkness or at the decisive tur - ning point of perspective? A Festival by HAU Hebbel am Ufer. Funded by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds. What is our rela - tionship with alien conscious - nesses? As we build rivals to human intelligence, James Bridle looks at our relationship with the planet’s other alien consciousnesses. 5 On 27 June 1835, two masters of the ancient DeepBlue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess, prise, strangeness and even horror that Chinese game of Go faced off in a match up to that point a game with Go-like status as AlphaGo evokes will become a feature of more which was the culmination of a years-long a bastion of human imagination and mental and more areas of our lives. rivalry. The young prodigy Akaboshi Intetsu superiority. But compared to AlphaGo, Deep - dominated the game early on using a secret Blue might as well have belonged to the The increasing complexity of the world around move developed by his teachers. But a day steam age; immensely powerful, IBM’s ma - us should be cause for political and social con - into the contest a number of chine lacked anything we cern, as intelligent but unknowable software ghosts appeared to his oppo - We have to would call intelligence. It works its way through society. But it’s also an nent, Hon’inbo ¯ Jo ¯ wa, and contend with brute-forced Kasparov off opportunity to rethink our relationship with showed him three critical inscrutable the board, calculating games the wider world, and to reconsider our place moves with which he was decisions made many moves ahead – but in it. It seems significant that we are investing able to win back control of merely that: calculating. so much time and energy in building these toy the game. At the point when about jobs and AlphaGo and its kind perform versions of our own minds, just as our ability it became clear that Aka - finances, health - something more akin to ima - to control our own destiny and live on the pla - boshi would not be able to care and road gination and intuition, and net sustainably appears to be failing. That fai - win the game, the young safety. moreover they do so in lure is in part one of hubris: the belief that we challenger violently coughed mathematical realms the can, as the planet’s dominant species, conti - up blood onto the board. He human mind cannot compre - nue to act selfishly, wastefully and without was found dead a few days later. The match hend. While we can follow DeepBlue’s line of regard to the future. But with AI comes the between Akaboshi and Jo ¯ wa has passed thought, the thinking behind AlphaGo’s deci - sense that we might not be the dominant into Go lore as the ‘blood-vomiting game’, and sions remain unknowable to us – and hence actor for much longer – and an attendant subsequent historians have attributed Aka - alien and otherworldly. opportunity to really consider what it means boshi’s decline to an undiagnosed pulmonary to share the world with other, barely knowable disease. They have been less forthcoming, To call AlphaGo and systems like it an Artificial intelligences. however, on the matter of ghosts, which may Intelligence is in some ways an exaggeration. still haunt the game to this day. It is a very narrow form of in - Because of course, we’ve telligence directed at a parti - With AI comes the shared the universe with On 29 December 2016, a new player appeared cular task, based on one par - sense that we other intelligences for a long on Tygem, a popular online Go server on which ticular computational confi - time, and we’ve handled the might not be the many senior Go professionals trained and tes - guration – neural networks – situation pretty badly. We ted out new moves. The player was called and a technique called rein - dominant actor for have consistently downgra - Master, and immediately they began a blazing forcement learning. These are much longer – and ded or reclassified forms of winning streak: sixty victories in just seven pieces of software modelled an attendant oppor - intelligence that do not days, and barely resting between games. loosely on parts of the human tunity to really resemble our own narrow Many of the victories were over world cham - brain, which are trained on a consider what it definition, and as a result felt pion players. Master’s moves often seemed reward system which encou - means to share the free to treat their possessors wild, even impetuous, but they always resul - rages them to develop their world with other, as lesser creatures, lower ted in a win. After the fifty-ninth game Master own strategies. Despite this orders of beings, or not really barely knowable was revealed to be – as had been suspected – narrow focus, the benefits as things at all. To ignore, not a human player, but an Artificial Intelli - are generalisable; as well as intelligences. consume, despoil and poison gence. Master was the latest iteration of Deep - learning other games, the them, both to their detriment Mind and Google’s AlphaGo programme, which techniques developed for and in the final, devastating, had gained worldwide attention when it AlphaGo have been deployed by Google in analysis, to our own. defeated Go master Lee Sedol six months ear - everything from medical diagnoses to You - lier. Tube recommendations. And yet the last few decades have also seen the slow murmurings of recognition of other That game had been clse, but the New Year 'With AI comes the sense that we might not ways of thinking and being in the world, which games were already markedly different. When be the dominant actor for much longer ...' appears to us as a sudden flowering of forms Go players tried to describe the AI’s style of of intelligence which differ radically from our play, they struggled to reconcile it with any - Machine learning is being used by others to own. More and more species are being admit - thing known. One leading Go player said, screen applicants for jobs, pilot self-driving ted, grudgingly, to the community of those ‘they’re how I imagine games from far in the cars and target military drones. Neural net - that really think, from orangutans to ele - future’. Another reported feeling that an ‘alien works are live and connected to the stock phants, both of which have recently been intelligence’ had landed among them. The market, to distribution systems, to transport granted legal personhood in court cases. As machine’s own creator, Demis Hassabis, said infrastructure – to the very social, material, we recognise the differing forms of intelli - its moves seemed to emanate ‘from another and economic bases of our daily existence. It’s gence present in both AI and other species, dimension’. not just AlphaGo’s ‘god-like’ moves we have the business of assigning rankings to other to contend with, but inscrutable decisions creatures begins to seem as stupid and vio - The last great revolution in human-machine made about jobs and finances, healthcare and lent as assigning them to different races. This competition occurred in 1997, when IBM’s road safety – and the sense of mystery, sur - too is only the beginning of what we might 6 recognise, only the beginning of another outnumber our own cells ten to one, has been strangeness of mere toy intelligences begins strangeness, if we choose to see intelligence shown to have measurable effects on our to pale. as something that belongs not only to cognition. humans, and not only inside the human head. For a long time we have been as unheeding of 'The centrality of human intelligence is on these intelligences as we have been deaf to Octopuses in aquaria are now known to the point of being knocked violently aside the frequency of electrons, and blind to the recognise individual humans, and to prefer by our own inventions...' ultraviolet light that soaks the plants around some to others, squirting water at those they us. But they have been here all along, and are dislike. Disliking brightness, At the other end of the scale, becoming undeniable, just as the capacities of they squirt water at light We find ourselves the largest organism in the our own technologies threaten to supersede bulbs above their tanks to world is a forest in Colorado, us. After wilfully ignoring the intelligences of standing upon extinguish them too: they are a hundred-acre expanse of others for so long, the centrality of human not merely aware of their a ruined planet, cloned aspen sharing a sin - intelligence is on the point of being knocked environment, but seek to not smart enough gle, 80,000 year-old intercon - violently aside by our own inventions.