by Jochen Szangolies
The arbor porphyriana is a scholastic system of classification in which each individual or species is categorized by means of a sequence of differentiations, going from the most general to the specific. Based on the categories of Aristotle, it was introduced by the 3rd century CE logician Porphyry, and a huge influence on the development of medieval scholastic logic. Using its system of differentiae, humans may be classified as ‘substance, corporeal, living, sentient, rational’. Here, the lattermost term is the most specific—the most characteristic of the species. Therefore, rationality—intelligence—is the mark of the human.
However, when we encounter ‘intelligence’ in the news, these days, chances are that it is used not as a quintessentially human quality, but in the context of computation—reporting on the latest spectacle of artificial intelligence, with GPT-3 writing scholarly articles about itself or DALL·E 2 producing close-to-realistic images from verbal descriptions. While this sort of headline has become familiar, lately, a new word has risen in prominence at the top of articles in the relevant publications: the otherwise innocuous modifier ‘general’. Gato, a model developed by DeepMind, we’re told is a ‘generalist’ agent, capable of performing more than 600 distinct tasks. Indeed, according to Nando de Freitas, team lead at DeepMind, ‘the game is over’, with merely the question of scale separating current models from truly general intelligence.
There are several interrelated issues emerging from this trend. A minor one is the devaluation of intelligence as the mark of the human: just as Diogenes’ plucked chicken deflates Plato’s ‘featherless biped’, tomorrow’s AI models might force us to rethink our self-image as ‘rational animals’. But then, arguably, Twitter already accomplishes that.
Slightly more worrying is a cognitive bias in which we take the lower branches of Porphyry’s tree to entail the higher ones. Read more »
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Ryan Ruby is a novelist, translator, critic, and poet who lives, as I do, in Berlin. Back in the summer of 2018, I attended an event at TOP, an art space in Neukölln, where along with journalist Ben Mauk and translator Anne Posten, his colleagues at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, he was reading from work in progress. Ryan read from a project he called Context Collapse, which, if I remember correctly, he described as a “poem containing the history of poetry.” But to my ears, it sounded more like an academic paper than a poem, with jargon imported from disciplines such as media theory, economics, and literary criticism. It even contained statistics, citations from previous scholarship, and explanatory footnotes, written in blank verse, which were printed out, shuffled up, and distributed to the audience. Throughout the reading, Ryan would hold up a number on a sheet of paper corresponding to the footnote in the text, and a voice from the audience would read it aloud, creating a spatialized, polyvocal sonic environment as well as, to be perfectly honest, a feeling of information overload. Later, I asked him to send me the excerpt, so I could delve deeper into what he had written at a slower pace than readings typically afford—and I’ve been looking forward to seeing the finished project ever since. And now that it is, I am publishing the first suite of excerpts from Context Collapse at Statorec, where I am editor-in-chief.![Henri Matisse created many paintings titled 'The Conversation'. This, from 2012, is of the artist with his wife, Amélie. [Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia].](https://3quarksdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Matisse_Conversation-360x292.jpg)
