9. Alignment (w/ Benjamin Bratton)

Benjamin Bratton writes about world-spanning intelligences, grinding geopolitical tectonics, “accidental megastructures” of geotechnical cruft, the millienia-long terraforming project through which humans rendered an earth into a world, and the question of what global-scale order means in the twilight of the Westphalian nation-state.

Candidly, if either of us were to recommend a book to help you understand the present state of ‘politics’ or ‘technology’, we’d probably start with Bratton’s The Stack — written 10 years ago, but still very much descriptive of our world and illuminative of its futures.

If the first 10 minutes are too “tech industry” for you — just skip ahead. The whole conversation is seriously fire, and it spikes hit after hit of takes on privacy, bias, alignment, subjectivity, the primacy of the individual … all almost entirely unrepresented within the Discourse.

Some references:

• We briefly talk about EdgeML, which essentially means the execution of ML models on small computers installed in a field location.
• Benjamin mentions his collaboration with renowned computer scientist and thinker Blaise Agüera y Arcas, whose work on federated learning is relevant to this stage of the conversation. Federated learning involves a distributed training approach in which a model is updated by field components who only transmit changes to a model therefore retaining the security of local training sets to their own environments only. Also - here’s a link to their collaboration on “The Model is the Message."
• Benjamin calls himself a bit of an “eliminative materialist” “in the Churchland mode,” meaning someone who believes that “folk psychologies” or “folk ontologies” (theories of how the mind works from metaphysics, psychoanalysis, or generalized psychology) will be replaced by frameworks from cognitive science or neuroscience.
• Benjamin calls out a collaboration with Chen Quifan. Check out Waste Tide — it’s excellent sci-fi.
• The collaboration with Anna Greenspan and Bogna Konior discussed in the pod is called “Machine Decision is Not Final” out on Urbanomic.
• Shoshana Zuboff is a theorist who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” referring to capital accumulation through a process of ‘dispossession by surveillance.’ The implicit critique of “surveillance capitalism” in this episode hinges on its overemphasis on individual sovereignty.
• “Tay” was the infamous AI Twitter Chatbot Microsoft rolled out for 16 hours before pulling back for its controversial content.
• Antihumanism refers to a rejection of the ontological primacy and universalization of the human afforded to it through the philosophical stance of “humanism.” An “antihumanist" is someone who challenges the stability of the concept of the “human” or at very least its salience in cosmic affairs.
• Check out Benjamin’s new piece on Tank Mag (Tank.tv), it’s fire. And check out Anna Kornbluh’s AWESOME “Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism” on Verso.