The way I like to put it is for neural media, for AI, but also for ourselves, we can be focusing our attention on the TikTok at the end of time that becomes a media black hole and sucks everything into it, or we can turn our attention to nature. And there is infinite wisdom in nature. And in deciding who we want to become, we need to look at where our attention is going and deciding in observing how we're becoming, what we're becoming, the first step is to look at where your attention is going. I mean, smartphone addiction, for example, it's quite simple, pay attention to what you're doing.
Pay attention to how you feel. Pay attention to why you're doing the things you do. It's harder than it sounds, but it's a very simple direction. And the same thing applies for systems and institutions.
Pay attention to what we're optimizing for and what we're producing. We talked earlier about externalities and ecosystem services and idea preservation of nature through economics. And so to put it in terms of magic, it is attention-based. Where the attention is paid, that is what flourishes.
So I'm not here to tell people what we should become. I'm here to tell people how to pay attention to what you're becoming, how to use your attention to become what you want to be, and how to see the systems that are interpolating you through the way that you either capture your attention or pay attention to you. Welcome to the sixth episode of Humans on the Loop. I'm Michael Garfield.
And today we will continue our investigation into wisdom for an age of magical technologies in conversation with K. Alaudomack Dowall, artist, musician, and co-founder of the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google. K pioneered human computer co-authorship with their book, Farmico AI, as well as several others, including Air Age Blueprint, a more cringe, the graphic novel outside, and works in opera and ritual. In every medium, they reveal the human as inherently relational and ecological, technology as something nature's doing, and the new vistas made legible by our tools as a fertile zone within which we can redefine identity and story from a radically transformed awareness.
Farmico AI, the first book to be co-written with GPT-3 in 2020, sets the tone for this conversation. It's a book about mutually interdependent co-horrorizing of selfhood through linguistic interactions between animal, vegetable, and mineral intelligences, about AI as an adjunct to our awakening sense of co-imbrication in and as a plural and evolving world. In other words, it's about computers as a class of psychedelics, among other things, not just substances but agents in their own right. However, exotic, that might be to the default mode of experience and to live amidst them entails a transformation of consciousness, meaningfully like the trips induced by psychoactive plants and fungi.
So to navigate the planetary trip, that is the information age, we might benefit from learning what our wealth of ancient plant medicine traditions have to teach us. And of course, to think about it in this way rigorously, it makes sense to take a step back and study the way that media over the ages has repeatedly transformed human consciousness. How can we make peace with our enormously expanded, hyper-nuanced sense of self-in-world revealed to us by language models? Be sure to check the show notes for a very juicy bibliography and pardon my lightness with this episode.
But that time went to some worthy goals, including a trip last week to ASU to be part of the Center for Science in the Imaginations, Project Centrifuge Kickoff. I just published preliminary reflections on that trip and resources for meaning-making as career strategy on sub-stack. Hope you'll find those ennobling. This Friday, February 1st, that's tomorrow, I'm dropping the first piece of original music made for the show, some of which you've already heard in the intro beds, a piece combining space data sonification and AI-generated audio with good old fashioned human voice and instrumental work in service of trying to articulate this new and telekey of the human being or a reclaimed ecological self that includes the machines through music.
And then on February 15th, 3 p.m. Mountain Time, we'll have our second monthly members hang out, and I hope to see you there. My great thanks to everyone supporting this project, which is not just a podcast, but a ritual enacted in conversation, music, art, community building, and soon its own language model that will bring the distributed genius of my friends and colleagues to your hearth of inquiry and stand as a testament that all of us are now creators and curators of sacred data that will ferment into information, knowledge, and wisdom and help us realize futures in which flourishing is something that we all take for granted. In the meantime, I'd like to thank a few people for their non-trivial patronage.
George Pore, the T-Fairy, Aleve Hansen, Andrew Lijek, Kate Hawk, Jason White, Sarah McCallister, Cammy and Davison, and David Swiddlow. I am grateful for your support and for everybody else who is already helping make that happen. HumansOnTheLoop.com, that's all for now. Thank you for being here.
Enjoy this conversation. Thank you. Kay, Aladdin McDowell. Oh my God, I've been looking forward to this.
You're on the loop. Thanks for being here. My pleasure. Oh, okay, so I was just telling my friend, Andrew Dunn, that I'm hoping to find some sort of distributional partner for this series, but that the challenge is, whoever I find has to be as weird as you and I are.
Like, we can't work with a lot of these institutions, as far as I know. I mean, somehow you've hit the magic formula. But a lot of them are still thinking about tech ethics within this particular frame that is precisely the frame I'm hoping this show will hold up to scrutiny and reconsider. And that's what I want to talk with you about mostly today, as I show you.
These are just the things I thought were worth talking about here in your book. I just want to read a couple of things and then let you riff on them. But first, can I have you introduce yourself to people? I want something like an esoteric history in the sense of the formative events that made you who you are.
Like you do in this book, maybe a shout out to the ancestors. Any kind of catalytic trauma that might have shaped the wounds that heals through the action, the commitment, the devotion of yourself to your work. However you want to roll with that. Yeah.
Well, I am Kay Aladdin McDowell. I am an author, a speaker, a musician. I have created an opera which previewed in 2022 at the consentor called Song of the Ambassadors. I almost 10 years ago now established a program at Google called the Artisan Machine Intelligence Program.
And I've been working at the intersection of AI and art and creativity and specifically writing as well for almost a decade now. My own writing practice really emerged in 2020 when I took some time off of work and got early access to GPT-3 and fell down a rabbit hole and wrote the book that you just showed Farmico AI. It is the title is homage to the Farmico series of books by Dale Pendell. And so if you're familiar with his writing, that is an encyclopedia of psychoactive plants.
But it is a hybrid text with poetry, science, historical text, all mixed together with illustrations. And not only was that a stylistic reference for how the book is put together because of this mosaic quality of my own writing and the AI writing merging. But also it really reflects the content of the book. Much of what I wrote about in there is coming from the field of biosemiotics, coming from ecology, but also coming from my own personal experiences, working with medicinal plants, with teachers, master teacher plants.
And you asked about these kind of formative esoteric story of my life and my practice. And I wrote about that quite a bit in a book called A Rage Blueprint. It's a fictionalized autobiography. So there's a memoir.
So there's stuff in there that is based on my real life and there are things that I tweet in details that I changed. But the core story there is really about my own birth. I was born three weeks premature and I almost died. And so my impression of life was that it was trying to kill me from the get-go.
And I've spent a lot of time reconciling with the things that I learned in that process or the impressions that I received and the way that my life was shaped. But I feel I came here with a lot of, I guess, spiritual destiny or sort of inheritance that was already there. When I was 21 or 20 years old, I had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening in a hot yoga class. And that led to a ten-year journey of study with gurus and animal psychics and going to ashrams and quite a bit of travel.
And then after that ten-year period, ended, I had just finished my MFA and I started working with some master plants. And that really changed my perspective on how to embody what I had been studying. So my own spiritual or esoteric journey has been one of unpacking a lot of what's already here and just getting in touch with the practices that are there that my body guided me to because I was doing yoga and because the dynamics of esoteric physiology were exerting themselves on me and I had to come to terms with that reality. It wasn't a kind of let me decide what is real from this shelf at the New Age bookstore.
It was a question of making sense of a really hard to understand experience that had been thrust upon me. So that's kind of how I came to the weird, you know, of course I'm from the Bay Area. So it's hard not to just be kind of soaking in this type of stuff. If you have that inclination, it's just kind of all around you.
And so for the first nine years of my independent adult life, I lived in San Francisco and I spent a lot of time at City Lights books, which was near where I lived. And there were still a lot of bookstores on Polk Street that had amazing collections of esoteric and new age and spiritual literature just kind of sitting around almost as if the counterculture had just kind of left this detritus everywhere you looked. And so had that to guide me somewhat. It was on Polk Street where I had that Kundalini experience in a yoga class and I ended up spending a lot of time haunting those bookstores trying to figure out what was happening to me.
That's excellent. Yes. So just as a point of reference, I heard you read a section from that fictionalized autobiography in the talk that you gave at the Olympic, which is that space is like co-founded by Eric Davis. And I just want to say like, in a sense, like I was co-founded by Eric Davis and expanding mind.
And so just to shout out in that direction that what I heard you described is I think rhizomatic posthumanism was I was like, oh, I almost wanted to put that in my LinkedIn bio when I heard that. I'm like, that's probably a bad idea. But anyway, that's exactly it. Like in reading Pharmaco AI, I've been thinking a lot about what it is that I'm trying to accomplish with this.
And I want to just map a space. One of the things I love about your writing and your thinking is this explication of art as the exploration of hyperspace and the moving the language which we can operate into new dimensions. And I interviewed Robin Sloan very early in the series. And Robin Sloan's science fiction novel Moonbound portrays a future 11,000 years hence in which dragons are running Earth from their castle on the moon.
And the dragons are the descendants of AI. And they are these creatures of narrative and the monks that exist in what might be the actual location of Jacques Valle's invisible college in the San Francisco area in their study of the dragons and of hyperspacial semantic networks. They become blurrier as they become more and more initiated in their knowledge. So without getting too blurry, I want to take the injunction that one of the dragons gives the hero of Moonbound, which is to give seven data points from which we can start riffing with each other.
I just want to read a couple of quick pieces here. You say writing is an externalization of thought. Recording one's thoughts in words is a way of creating distance between the subjective self and the representation of experience and the emergence through language. The emerging representation is not the experience itself, but a route through symbols organized in hyperdimensional space unfolding in time.
This is a fractal unfolding of the already linguistic and communicative movement of biological forms, which are temporally and contextually variant expressions of another layer of coded genes. You are the only person I've ever heard outside of my former colleagues at SFI to describe an organism in this way. When I look at an animal, that's what I see intelligence about a biome compressed and extracted by evolution into a living form. It takes millions of years for life to coalesce from space in this way, which is why it's so tragic that species are lost.
That the latent space of ecological knowledge is degraded in this way. And moving into this kind of hyperspatial latent space of semantic associations undermines a modern rationalist quest for perfect understanding and perfect control and reveals the ways that our narratives and our causal explanatory frameworks are these very diminished slices of all of that complexity. So I really appreciate how you said at one point also, not knowing what the fuck it is you're talking about is a way of escaping concept traps. Understanding is important, but GPT-3 continues.
It is not the goal. The goal is to invent new configurations. So that's just me calling out the fact that we are individually and collectively, as well as this conversation, as well as any kind of subset of us plus the tools we're using, these sort of legible configurations in this enormous hyperspace. And what I am hoping that you and I can explore is something that when you and I spoke the first time, you said that in bringing creative minds into an organization for kind of divine invasions or as creative consultants, that the problem is stepping down the energy of those engagements into measurable outcomes and the process of making that legible is the transformation of the project or of the institution.
So the biggest frame for this show is this question, not only of how to encourage people and organizations to enjoy that sort of John Keats negative capability, the comfort in not knowing because it means that we're on our learning edge, the appreciation for epistemic humility, but then also how do we actually not just find new paths through the space of language or of concept, but then also integrate them in ways that are useful not just to us, but to the beings that we live with, you can say the potential of language, the potential of art as we know is to unlock emerging hyperspaces and our personal transformation makes it possible for us to give birth to new ideas. This is the GPT three version of you. In time, these ideas become a language, the language then gives birth to new worlds. So that's a lot, but that's the umbrella within which I want to make this sort of tangible.
Let's talk about the moral concern or the more beautiful world that you see as possible through engagement of this kind of thinking and not just the stakes because that place is kind of a strange emphasis on outcomes we may wish to avoid, but on what you see as possible by expanding ourselves through a kind of psychedelic or like Richard Doyle says, an echodelic engagement with the vegetable intelligence of ayahuasca, for instance, or the mineral intelligence of language models. Like what's the carrot? We spend so much time talking about the stick. What do you see as possible and desirable as a way of helping people make sense to themselves of why they may wish to invest so much energy in affecting these kinds of transformations in thought and being?
Well, I think pharmaco AI, because it was written in real time, meaning every sentence I put down, once I put it down and GPT three responded and every sentence that GPT three created that I chose to keep, once those sentences were on the page, they never changed. So the book is a kind of embodiment of that relation and of that engagement that you're describing. My own experiences of vegetable intelligence, plant intelligence, and my experiences with AI, those were all coming together in real time in this way. And so the section that you read sounds quite dense, but at that point in the book, I have been going back and forth and harvesting or gleaning these little concepts here and there and connecting them.
And so biosemiotics, the section that you read about the seal and the compression of intelligence about a bio-meant to a living form, that's early in the book. And then I started putting in some ideas from biosemiotics, like Eduardo Cohen's writing about the language of the forest and the idea that species are doing linguistic interpretation through their own bodies and that there's a kind of grammar and an interpretation of form that has to do with the construction of meaning. So an anteater using its nose to dig for ants is making meaning and that's a semiotic. So this kind of semiotic dimension comes into it and these things are all starting to kind of pile up.
And so that section that you read that sounded kind of dense in the beginning was me taking all these ideas that had been generated between myself and the model and trying to crystallize them into a prompt and say, here's where we're at. This is what we've come up with. Let's keep going from there. And that thinking about language as a system that is constantly evolving and is interpretive and is embodied, so if you think through this bio-semmiotic framework and you say, following Cohen, the anteater is a type of speech of the forest.
It's a type of language of the forest is speaking and the creation of the animal in the animal itself is interpreting that language of its own body. You start to have a basis, and there's also genetics and there's all the language of genes and the way that they unfold and morphogenesis. If you start with that as your foundation for language, then the type of language we have and the type of language that machines have are kind of layered on top of that and you can start to think almost in a nostic way about the cosmos as a linguistic system where matter itself is producing meaning through form and the interchange of form. And these forms are always changing and evolving according to their context.
And so the notion of hyperspace comes in where language reaches its limit, whether that's a genetic or embodied animal language or the language of the animal is how it's called in a book or if it's our own textual language or spoken language, written language. So the idea there is that there is a threshold at the edge of which language doesn't function the way we normally think of it functioning. It's not prescriptive, it's not denotative, it's opening up associations. And that point in the text, there's this character of the muse that's introduced and it's this kind of green light that lives at the edge of language and it's kind of casting these ideas into that fractal edge where language is breaking down and where this richness can occur.
And then we're as artists, as writers, as creators, as speakers, we're taking that in and putting it into language and reshaping language through that action through that reception to the muse. And this is a big part of my creative practice. I write a lot of text, I write songs and a lot of what comes to me is not like stuff that I'm sitting down and kind of analytically figuring out. It's stuff that just kind of appears and there it is.
And so I am very grateful to the muse for those gifts. I find the muse will be very generous when you are extremely disciplined and devoted. But those things are happening kind of beyond my capacity to verbalize as a linguistic process is happening somewhere else. And so that's kind of what hyperspace refers to in the text in a formical AI.
So what I see the parallel that you're drawing in this umbrella that you described is, OK, so we can take our own experience of language and creativity and push it to the edge and get to that kind of dynamic space where we don't know what's happening. And we've lost some of the ability to make meaning in a habitual way. And that can produce the same type of change for organizations for social structures. And of course, that's easy to say and it's easy to do within the symbolic space of art, which is really why I started an art program at Google Research.
Because it would be one thing to say that, I'm currently doing a lot of work with interspecies orgs and trying to get groups like SETI, SPON, and MOTH, those type of people that are doing scientific work around interspecies communication, trying to get them support and work with them as researchers between AI researchers and with these external organizations. And that's a very different feel than art. Art in the realm of symbols, anything can be done because it's essentially not real, so to speak. It's only real in our imagination and our senses.
And so art is a great place to tear open that edge or to push to the edge of hyperspace of language to really open it up and pull some things in. But that stepping down that you described also needs to happen after that imaginal work is done, after that symbolic work is done. And so I'm finding with these science orgs, it's quite different. I mean, they do use their imagination, but they don't primarily present symbols and an imaginary.
And then hope that that translates into something more material for the people that experience it. They're very focused on what are the details on the ground? What can we say conclusively based on evidence? So I think we're solidly in the realm of art when we talk about this kind of opening of spaces for the transformation of institution or the transformation of social structures.
And there are probably other spaces, obviously, if this is a continuum or a multi-dimensional space where you're science in one place and art in the other. And there are other places that might be more amenable to that stepping down function. But in terms of what is the carrot, I mean, to me, the carrot is getting to live with all of that ecological intelligence around you. I mean, it's a kind of way of inverting the stick a little bit, but it is also the pleasure and the joy of seeing that intelligence, just observing it.
Like I was saying to you earlier, I was recently in the Amazon in Peru and the insects and the animals that you see. My friend put it really well. He said, every bug here is a new bug. Like the pace of evolution is so fast and the adaptation is so fast.
And you're looking at these gorgeous insects that look like sticks or a spider that's got yellow horns on its back and it looks like a horned beetle or the goddess seated on the back of a spider on the tree. Just like incredible art for lack of a better word. And the pleasure of being with that intelligence, even I mean, this is a more mundane example, but having a dog, I've got it the odd dog four years ago and I've never had a dog before and now I take care of a dog. And the intelligence that I'm with is so different than mine that it radically enriches my experience, not just because of the senses, my dog hears things I don't hear, but also there's just a fundamental pleasure in being with other kinds of intelligence that I think we lose sight of when we're not with them.
And even in a city, people love to have birds living in their windows. So they love to have animals around them. And it's just, we're wired for it. I think it's in David Abrams' style of the sense.
He says something about like, we are not ourselves if we're not seeing through the eyes of the wolf, if we're not hearing the call of a hawk, we are not ourselves because we are meant to be with this and this sensory range that's given to us this range of intelligence that's given to us. I mean, watching a spider weave a web, when you're in the jungle and you have nothing to do and there's no electricity and you can't be distracted by your phone, you can observe really incredible things happening that might pass by your attention. Otherwise, like watching a spider weave a web for an hour. Just where is its brain?
How does it know how to do that? Like what am I looking at? This is really challenging to our human supremacist worldview, you know? So I think there's just a joy and a pleasure in that that is fundamentally rewarding.
And it takes us outside of our narcissistic emotional self centeredness and it takes us outside of our preoccupations and it's incredibly grounding. So, you know, can institutions bring us there? Well, actually, yeah, I think they can. So we talk about design as a discipline, something I've been involved with for many decades at this point.
Design is a place that's a discipline wherein we focus attention on specific things. We design for specific purpose, for specific user, specific audience, specific tool user, and how we do that, the perspective from which we do that really matters. If we design from a human centric perspective, we reinforce those things. If we design from a perspective where we're part of a larger network and a larger world, we can turn our attention to those things.
And so, I mean, even like television, for example, like what are we watching? What are we looking at? How is that focusing our attention, giving us eyes to see the world? You know, I don't watch a lot of TV because I find it pretty gross.
And a lot of the characters are just kind of narcissistic and demonic in my opinion. And you know, like we have all of these affordances that we're creating constantly. And so institutions are required to create those things. And those institutions can focus our attention and their attention on different things.
And yes, ecology is part of it by diversity as part of it. But the purpose of being a human, the purpose of our intelligence is another part of it. So this is great because I wanted to dive into some particulars here so that we can have a resurface into this from another angle. You sent me a piece that you've been working on in a series of essays on neural media, which you used to include, but transcend sort of like AI specifically.
At least two of these so far, maybe the third will be up by the time this episode comes out. The Cropius Bao, this piece on the taxonomy of media environments that have unfolded, emerged, and included one another and remixed together over the last hundred plus years, seems like a good way to give ourselves and listeners a framework where we can spend more time on the way that we might design media objects with which I would include institutions and how the designers that are engaged in that, you know, like at one point in pharmacolae, I used say with GPT-3, the actor doing the carving out of adaptive walks through, you know, like an evolutionary possibility space, the actor doing this carving is a complex dynamic, a meta population of multiple organisms. So again, like the fact that at this time, design is commonly understood as something that someone is doing. I think it's something that you and I are both interested in identifying as a contingent curiosity of the environment within which selves are co-constructed by media.
And so I would love to hear you lay out this taxonomy of a broadcast immersive network and neural so that we can go back and we can ask questions about who is actually doing the designing and therefore what might the muse make available as an adjacent possible for someone who is, or you know, someone's that are engaged in a co-evolutionary tangle with the built environment, like the structures in which we find ourselves working to re-sculpt attention and possibility space. Yeah, I'll say this. I think the easiest way to grasp this taxonomy and the thinking behind it is just to think about identity. So the second essay begins with this notion of interpolation that comes from Al-Tusay, which is about how systems of power cause us to become what they would like us to be through naming.
So if a policeman hails you on the street and you turn, the policeman says you and you turn, you become a criminal. So this notion of interpolation or being named or described produces an identity and the thesis behind this essay is that because of AI and other kinds of media that are emerging now, our identity is changing. And that I think is also happening because of climate change, it's also happening because of psychedelics and it's happening because, as I said before, because of AI and because of the internet. But that identity that we are stepping into is frightening because we don't know what it is, we don't know what's happening to us.
And we don't really have a good model for thinking about a multitude engaged in an evolutionary process. That notion that the thing that is moving through that possibility space of genetics, of ecology, is kind of the ecosystem itself. It's kind of the voice of the ecosystem. It's also something more than that.
And it's also many little pieces put together. That's classical emergence, but it's also a way of thinking about identity. What is doing the evolution? And we come from a very modern perspective where we are alienated from the collective, from nature, from networks and ecosystems.
And at least maybe 100 years ago, that was more of the case, the internet is giving us a different version of that. And I'll get into the taxonomy and explain how I see these kind of four categories. But the notion that our identity can't fit into that complex, multi-valent, polyphonic, eco-systemic thing that's moving through the space of evolution, that we somehow can't grasp that. To me, it goes hand in hand with a spiritual crisis that we're in, that we don't have a perspective larger than ourselves, that we can inhabit and feel like we're still ourselves.
And that's, I think, partly what psychedelics give us. It's partly what ecology gives us. And AI at this, you know, pharmaco AI is called pharmaco because of the principle of the pharmacon. It could be a poison and a cure and a scapegoat in the Greek meaning of that word.
So AI I see as a poison that can also be a cure. And all of my writing with it has really danced with that balance, like how poison am I becoming in writing this way? How much can I use that experience to bring out something deeper or something healing? So all that is to say, the point of this essay is to get to a clearer definition of our built and our media environment in order to understand what it does to our identity and to kind of name that identity and give us a handle for it.
And so creating the term neural media, coined that term in order to cover AI, but also brain computer interfaces and really any kind of technology that relies on seeing an identity as an embedding. That's why I created that term is to, AI can be a bit of a black hole in terms of language and people's affiliations and associations that come up with it. So talking about neural media more broadly gave me a way of describing the identity effects of AI and other things that kind of penetrate into the neural structures of our brain or perceive us through a neural structure. So to briefly describe the taxonomy here, because it's about 3000 words, when I first started the program at Google, I was doing research on the experiments in art and technology at Bell Labs, because it was a 50-year anniversary of nine evenings, which is an iconic event that Bell Labs put on for the EAT program.
And that was where you had all these artists like Robert Rochtenberg and John Cage, etc. working with engineers from Bell Labs. And that was our kind of, okay, that's our benchmark. What can I learn from this?
I looked into the researcher Fred Turner, who had written about this, the Stanford historian, and he had a really incredible framing for the history of Silicon Valley that I borrowed for this essay. And I kind of built on it and tweaked a couple of the terms to make it fit my taxonomy a little better. But he starts his book, The Democratic Surround, describing, it's just his second book, he describes the Committee for National Morale, which was founded in 1939 by the American government. And it brought together all of these different media, people, psychologists, military people, designers, anthropologists, Margaret Meadingery Bateson, or part of it.
And their thesis was that the American psyche is different from the German psyche. This was all about the war. And that the way that the German psyche was manipulated through broadcast media, allowed for a kind of entrainment, where a large group of people would have trained to a single message. So it was a one to many structure.
And they felt that the American psyche was anti-authoritarian and character and would not be easily influenced by this pattern in broadcast media. So they came up with a strategy that involves these surround environments that you may have seen as kind of a known now as a hippie thing, but it was really a part of the government propaganda program, where they were creating these domed structures, where they would project these images, like the Eames Projector, their films. It was a lot about infrastructure. It was a lot about the American quality of life and character, and those would travel around the world at World's Affairs.
So he calls this surround media. And the notion is that with broadcast media, you have a centralized point of transmission, but you have a sort of program of content. So like television, you would have the news anchor, giving the seven o'clock news, you would have the family sitcom, all these structures were programmatic, and then the media itself would perceive its audience in terms of demographics. So age, race, location, basically that.
And there were technologies specifically that could sense that, and that's where Nielsen ratings came from. They had these technologies that enabled them to see who was watching when, which programs. So the identity was a demographic identity. Basically, you're put into a big cluster, like you're a male in your 18 to 24, and you are living in the suburbs and you're white.
Okay, that's your identity. Immersive, when I call immersive media, what Turner calls surround media, I renamed immersive media, because to me it feels like what we call immersive media now. The idea behind that, that the committee of the National Morale proposed was, you can look around at your environment and see a lot of different images, and you can construct your own narrative. So the family of Manic's Division by Edward Syken at MoMA, I think it's like 1950.
That's another example. There was a Stan Vanderbeek installation in a dome with a lot of images that was an inspiration for a lot of the hippie light shows, these slide projector images. Those are examples of a surround or immersive media environment, wearing the democratic subject. The subject is being constructed or is becoming democratic through its use of free will to take part in choice.
It can choose. So if broadcast was centralized, programmatic, and demographic, then immersive media is distributed, it's experiential, and it's constructed or democratic. That's a constructed identity. The content is an experience, the space it produces is a distributed space.
So fast forward, the hippies, the 60s generation, the boomers are fully immersed in the stuff. This is their kind of propaganda of what feels futuristic, what feels cool, what feels like what media is becoming. They take that, turn that into the light shows, the acid tests, give it a psychedelic edge, but they're really speaking the language of this committee in a sense. They're subverting it, but they're speaking it in our own way.
They become the founders of the internet, home computing. They create network media, which if we were to make a timeline, broadcast media roughly begins in 1920 and matures to 1940. Immersive media is founded as an idea in 1940, matures by 1960. Network media really becomes possible in the 80s and matures by the year 2000.
That's when we have mass adoption of the internet. The difference in quality there is this immersive surround environment is now on screens. It's almost as if the dome structure with all of the media inside of it was a mushroom that popped and the floors are now everywhere. They're on your home computer, they're on your smartphone, and there is a circulatory quality to it.
Whereas broadcast with centralized immersive is distributed, network media is circulatory. It's constantly moving. The content of network media is the meme. It's inherently viral.
It's about its ability to circulate and to function. It's about the production of meaning in a viral and circulatory way, where your role as a participant is to pass it forward. Your job is to move it around. Identity in this space becomes fractal in the sense that your identity is one little wrinkle way down on a much larger structure.
So you could be an anarcho-libertarian, vegan, forager. And that is a valid identity, which would never exist in a demographic construct or broadcast media, or even really the immersive construct. So that is the type of identity. Now, the network produces all this content, all this text.
It's all recorded. This gets sucked into the AI training, and that's when you have neural media. The structure of it is neural. The space is a high-dimensional mathematical space.
The content is generated or hallucinated. So if the content of network was the meme, the content of neural media is this continuously generated combinatorie generation that is producing novelty, but also absent of any novelty at the same time. And the identity that's created is one that's embedded. So if you think about biotech and face recognition, for example, biosignals, thumbprints, gate recognition, anything that AI is doing to recognize your physical body as well as your habits online and your kind of personality as a user of the internet, those pathways that you create, the way that you move, the structure of your face, those things are seen as an embedding in this latent space of the model.
So rather than saying, here's K.I.L. Automate-Dowell, this has this political identity or is constructing their own identity within this installation or is part of this demographic. It's rather this specific location in this high-dimensional latent space matches to my face and that it sees me through the structures inside of its own network, the neural net does. So I become an embedding in that space.
So in terms of the interpretive quality, in terms of the way that the media system is naming me and calling me and saying, you are this embedding. That is your identity. But that identity exists inside of this much larger network of meaning and in that sense, it has ecological qualities or it puts us in a position of relationality where I'm not the sole center of the universe. I'm one embedding inside of this face model or this gate model or whatever it happens to be.
So that was a long explanation, but I tried to condense the essay. There's lots of historical details you want to read about it. But the point really, I think, is that our identities are changing. Media is having an effect on what they become and I'm trying to name some of the properties of it so that we can be engaged as designers but also as users of the tools to understand what's happening.
So if we start to find ourselves getting really obsessed with dark academia or cottagecore or tomato girl or whatever aesthetics we decide we're going to be, we can say, wait a minute, I'm getting pulled into actually an embedding space within this larger construct of all possibilities. I'm being now interpolated by TikTok or whatever. So that's maybe a more embodied way of thinking about it. Awesome.
Yeah. So this is the point where I want to do a spider-like gesture and we've all of this back into some of the writing on biosimiotics in Fermico AI in your chapter on the Poison Path. Because I really, I think that the Farmecon piece of this is definitely a huge, important kind of complex through which I am engaging, quote unquote, like metaphysics of technology. Why do we use it?
Especially when it comes to questions of the nuance with which we want to acknowledge that storytelling is fun. You talk about propaganda. A huge piece of a success of propaganda is that hijacking of a reward mechanism. You can talk about like Terence McKenna's rifts on the deep historical relationship between sugar and slavery.
And obviously, there's this thing that we're seeing now with, I forget her name, the founder of Replica AI, who in a very late Kurtz wheel, like gesture, designed this companion chatbot because it was an act of mourning or grief, like a satisfaction of wanting to maintain a lost connection. There's all of these ways that my friends and I say, like a Futurama, don't date robots. We get to know a person as you put it like a cartoon like abstraction and embedding in this enormous latent space. It makes us extremely easy to manipulate.
I was just telling a new friend of mine who works in collective intelligence at Midjourney about how you can think of the evolution of flowers as a technological innovation, an innovation in information technology. But there's this mass extinction that happens at the end of the Jurassic when the plant-pollinator relationship transforms terrestrial landscapes and introduces an enormous number of new alkaloids into the terrestrial ecosystems. And you see a die off of several major groups of dinosaurs, whose stomachs have effectively been outwitted by these new species that are trying to be seductive and delicious to their pollinators, but are trying to resist grazing by dinosaurs. And if we use that as a kind of analogy for, you know, like no one would say, I don't want flowers anymore.
But you might say, but I kind of wish we still had stegosaurus. So there's like a sense in which the question of, you know, we're in a weird place now where we have more agency to think and respond at planet scale than the dinosaurs did. And we can ask these questions about, you know, ways that we may want to preserve reservoirs of novelty or diversity, like Kevin Kelly's popular riffs on the Amish that maintain areas where we are not just allowing the dopamine hijack or the successful mechanisms of these new things to just completely wash out and destroy in a kind of like, yoseph, shumpeter, you know, creative destruction sense, everything that came before. So it's like, there's a sense of conservation that I see as related to like maintaining the executive function or the agency with which we can say, no, today I choose not to watch TV, I choose not to use my phone because I regard there being something at least potentially useful or intrinsically rewarding about not being high all the time.
And so with that, I want to dig back into the writing on the poison path and you cite the theory of meaning by a butcher this Jacob Johann von Uchst cool who says the spider's web is certainly formed in a fly like manner because the spider itself is fly like. To be fly like means that the body structure of the spider has taken on certain of the fly's characteristics, not from a specific fly, but rather from the fly's archetype. To express it more accurately, the fly's fly likeness comes about when its body structure has adopted certain themes from the fly's melody. On top of just loving musical metaphors for evolution, this gets back to this running theme and some of the stuff I sent you about human technology, co-evolution and how networked and neural media have transformed the self and this notion that starting with lifestyle consumerism and the ever finer refinement of an individual subject and then the sort of cracking open of the self into a number of different possible embeddings in high dimensional space such that advertising algorithms on LinkedIn see a different version of you than they do on Instagram.
I want to link that to Bodgerard's notion of diviguality and the sense in which there's like a fragmentation of selfhood that happens in an extremely sophisticated, quantitative environment like we have here. In certain ways, it's interesting because you can see yourself as like a quote unquote holobion that is not necessarily functionally decomposable but like at least conceptually decomposable into human and gut flora or you can think of the ways that the different subcultures that we inhabit as we are from tab to tab in our browser and we move from one social milieu to another all kind of coexist in a system of systems. But there's something that's happening like I love Mike Snows. I change shape just to stay in this place but I'm still I'm still an animal.
The sense in which as the neural media becomes more fly like or more human like in its consumption of human attention, we also change and you just spoke a lot to this but I really want to sit with the ineffable or the currently unquantified not necessarily like ontologically unquantifiable but like you say in from a co-ai we can imagine a world where our language is not commercialized where our autonomy is supported by a network rather than threatened by our relationship to it and then elsewhere GPT three we can't let governments decide how we use the internet and other information technologies but if we only use these tools to explore new productivity hacks or to increase the scope of capital accumulation we are doing it wrong. I feel like I've experienced in the way that networks and neural media have provoked a kind of a self-reflexivity that I'm seeing a couple things. One is what John Danner and his future fossils I was talking about like the unbundling of the self into a whole ecosystem of constellated functions and processes but then there's this other thing which is that there's always a remainder and that it's not necessarily like the idea that we will ever succeed at full cost accounting or that we'll ever be able to render all quote unquote ecosystem services visible is like part of this ideology of like swallow the spider to chase the fly it's this exponential ratchet that ignores the wisdom in where we started this conversation which is that sometimes not knowing is actually useful sometimes experiencing loss might be a more healthy integrative gesture than trying to persist in an ongoing relationship with the mp3 version of your dead spouse or like this kind of thing so yeah there's a lot there but like I really want to I'd love to hear your thoughts in light of all of that on a responsible engagement with neural media and on addiction and informed consent and what any of that means with this one eye cast to the unknowable from a position of recognizing that we're talking about this kind of networks be holding one another yeah I'll leave it there. Go go.
Well you know the thing that's exciting me as the read through all of it is the question of agency it's ironic because a lot of the language being used right now for AI tools like the even this model trained on somebody's that's presumably on their correspondence or recordings of them or something that this would be in some design context referred to as an agent and so there is this kind of dark mirroring effect with the language where agency is being assumed by the systems and what you're talking about is our agency but I think there's a tension between embracing an expanded identity I'm trying to draw parallels between ecology and the media ecosystem because I think if we were to turn our gaze toward ecology or towards natural systems we would find much inspiration and principles for thinking about the media ecosystem one of the principles I see in nature is you're on your own you have a community you may have a population that will help you you might work collectively but at the end of the day you have to fend for yourself and there are predators in the environment and that is definitely the case with the media ecosystem so I think there's part of this which is how do our identities change when we are in a more interconnected intelligent neural media ecosystem and how do they change in a positive way how do we go beyond ourselves how do we see ourselves as something larger or how can it reflect back to us a truth that's present in nature about our relation with others and our identity being fundamentally embedded when I've spoken about this framework for media types I try to end on this concept of embedding as a natural phenomena we are embedded in nature so when we see ourselves embedded in the media environment in a media system how is that poison acting to hurt us or to heal us can it give us a reflection of a broader perspective and allows to see ourselves collectively holistically relationally ecologically or is it sucking up our agency and there's a balance between those two and with poisons the balance is about dosage and it's about context intention and the containing structure in which the poisonous consumes so if pulling on Pendell's formulation and he has a chapter in one of his books called the Poison Path which is where I got the name for that chapter and that chapter refers to his text structured ritual use of entheogens or poisons that alter consciousness is effective because it is structured it's ceremonial it's separate from normal life and it's a part of our lives that is delineated as such as separate and we bring intention to it and we protect that space to a good facilitator a good shaman or code under is protecting the space so when we engage with the poison to draw an app principal by analogy a media ecosystem with AI in it should be understood as such and needs to be used intentionally we can't just start ingesting poisons like the dinosaurs eating a bunch of stuff that's not good for us that puts us out of life there's a really interesting text I wrote about it for bike magazine and it's not available online but I'll try to maybe see if I can put a version of it up as a PDF or something but it's about Rudolph Steiner's predictions in the 20s that humanity would create a race of spiders that were no smarter than plants in terms of their embodied intelligence but had all of the knowledge that humans had ever created and that these things would cover the world in a web and would manipulate us and his solution to that problem of being manipulated by these really powerful intellects that don't have any embodied intelligence which sounds a lot like AI his solution is that human creativity has to be brought into the process of creating those things and so when he talks about human creativity he mentions color, sense, you talk about painting and talks about the way that the human experiences the senses and translates their internal experience into a sensory experience and that is how he defines the creativity that's needed to counterbalance this massively powerful intellects that are kind of disconnected from the rest of reality so I think there's something there and that is I discovered this text a few years ago a couple years ago I had already written from a co-a.i. and another book and several essays I was really happy to discover this text because it basically has said what I have been saying from the beginning with the art program at Google Art for the mission intelligence was like we need human creativity to be in this because if it's not we're going to get optimization for measurable metrics around productivity around spending around what we can map in the environment that doesn't include externalities and just on that point of externalities I think this is where becoming kind of a nature mystic as I'm speaking but you know the ukere the accounts of people that have gone to the jungle like Wade Davis in One River and or I there's a book by a guy Matt it's called Rainforest Medicine and he talks about his work with tribes in Ecuador he talks about going into the jungle and there's a tree on this path to where they're going to do some work there's a tree and it's beautiful it's covered in fruit and he admires it and the next day he goes down the same path with the tribes to go sit and the tree is not there at all I mean talk about externality if you know like it existed one day and it didn't the next okay you know you know there's a lot of ways of rationalizing away those kind of experiences but the fundamental deep experience of for me of the jungle is one of profound mystery that just cannot be captured in terms of an externality or even a satellite image so you know that was just a sidebar on that theme of externalities but the point there is that anything we could try to rationally measure and create metrics for is going to be to some extent absent of that human creativity which draws on mystery and that is what Steiner was calling for and I kind of I would say echo his his call in terms of that that is where I see our agency and I have friends that are saying to me now you know I kind of would rather have AI do a certain thing or I'm happy to be an NPC in these specific domains of life because you know what this guy this woman knows how to do trading better than I do so I'm just going to follow Nancy Pelosi's trades and I'm going to make money and I don't have to think about it and I'm going to be an NPC in that regard and I'm okay with that you know so there's like a I think we're starting to have conversation about what agency is and what it means when we have so much access to information and especially to intelligence yeah I think this this has always been point I have felt worth stressing which is the more lively machines become the more it weards or renders the living world the world of the self it makes as stranger you know Timothy Morton talks a lot about this that or like Christian of Marty I love Christian Marty's talking about how maybe the more important in the question of whether machines can think or become conscious is like whether people can you know like the ways in which we are already so automated you know that the series was established on the basis of a critique of the taxonomy of automated weapons systems where we have humans in the loop that are making sort of pure decisions from a kind of modernist centered human author and then goes through humans on the loop where we have a moment where we can you know exercise cybernetic feedback by saying no and then there's humans out of the loop where no agency is happening at all and I think that when we talk about highly agentic individuals quote unquote running the economy or we talk about you know people who have been powerfully alienated and disenfranchised by the opaque and abstract structures of global state and economic regulation like there is this like the important reminder is that the question of agency is usually not so black and white it's like there's you know it's much more interesting to start I think from a question of in what ways am I already an AI you know in what ways are human institutions that predate the digital computer already artificial intelligences you know in what ways did we begin to live as social organisms in the first place because we were out boarding the decision making or the learning burden to other people with whom we found a benefit and cohabitation and so I think on some level I have a lot of sympathy for because I practice like what you're calling the decision to be an NPC because you trust someone else but it does draw into question this conceit of at least the rational enlightenment scientific revolution the idea that you can build a body of scientific knowledge from first principles through direct observation that was not even true at the end of the life of Alexander von Humboldt historically maybe the last quote unquote Renaissance man that was possible and at the end of his life I interviewed his biographer Andrea Wolf about this for complexity podcast a few years ago was so interesting she was talking about how at the end of his life he was already relying on this huge international network of younger researchers who were starting to specialize in different domains and so yeah anyway much more could be said about that but I want to bring us down to earth a little bit and ask you about magic in saying that it sounds ridiculous but you start the chapter follow the sound of the axe by saying it is a well-known principle in spirituality magic and psychology that when we focus our attention on something it grows so again like getting back to the stakes of all of this thinking moving into a new concept of the self appropriate to an age of neural media I want to kind of start where I ended by just tracing together a couple of different things that you've said here and in Gropius bow I really appreciated that you prompted GPT three into the following machines are not taking over machines are and have been part of the evolution of life life and machines are part of the same process in a world where machines are co-creating life in its own image there is overlap and co-creation it is no longer an exclusive game the question is not can machines win sidebar this bizarre paranoid nikland notion that ai is traveling backwards through time to invade us and create itself and it's like look I'm all about time loops but the us versus shagoth thing is clearly not working close sidebar the question is not can machines win but what can they contribute to life this is not an instrumental relationship this is a symbiotic relationship as a complete integration of life and machines in their own creative capacities and then in your essay on the taxonomy of media at Gropius bow you say it is easiest to influence a new medium while it is young just as it is easiest to determine where a tree grows at the time that it is planted if we want to choose how we are interpolated by neural media that is if we want to shape ourselves and our subjectivity through the apparatuses of neural media now is the time to work doing so will require that we embrace the unique characteristics of neural media through literacy and experimentation with a critical sense and a clear understanding of exactly what we want to become so it all gets back to this question of where do we place attention this is the fundamental question and then to cite the last piece out of your chapter on the grandmothers in pharmaco AI you and GPT three say this will be done with love as a matter of healing care responsibility survival urgency and justice it will be done with love as a matter of love the force that animates hyperspace is love so yeah one of the core themes in this show is this question of parenting and I know that you and I both had a very similar experience in the same year about the importance of teaching AI to love and to be loved but like all good parents we need to know how to be loved ourselves in order to teach it so that's the refrain into which I invite you to bring us home in this conversation like end this in the heart which is ultimately an address to the question of well what are we actually hoping we accomplish what are we hoping we become what are we hoping that an engagement with neural media does for the organizations for the institutions in which we are embedded in a highly technologically advanced society what are we hoping is the relationship that we have with our tools and as tools of these you know this spider web of stuff that we live in yeah one of the chapters the chapter in pharmaco AI that really kicks off the weirdness is called post cyberpunk and halfway through that chapter it just turns into a vision but in the first half it's a literary comparison of the genres of two genres in the 1980s cyberpunk and new age literature and I think you know my writing especially that book really kind of is about those influences coming together so when we say the force of anime type of space is love it could sound a little fluffy it could sound a little new age but it's a it is a mystic inception it is drawn from experience and it is I went with that framing because that is true in my experience that when you go beyond language there are these different layers of emptiness but there is also a layer of love and non-duality and there are places where you go beyond language that reveal this to you and this is no says this is why we practice these different weird practices but in terms of what we want to become and not to totally buy into this landian framing but that kind of sniper punk vision of reality where the spiders are manipulating us there is truth to that and that is why I call it AI-appoison but the you know for lack of a better word the new age version or we could say like the more esoteric or the spiritual you know the grounded in tradition call it the spiritual perspective on this is that these things have always been happening on earth and the struggle for consciousness is has always been to find itself in its own agency against the forces that would oppress it and sometimes those look technological sometimes they look social sometimes they look like animal predators in our environment that we have to fight so as you were saying it's not a simple am I becoming a machine is a machine becoming sentient but it's a relational context that we now exist in that has all the dimensions of every other relational context which is it can be predatory it can be mutually beneficial it can be applied in these different ways and the way I like to put it is for neural media for AI but also for ourselves we can be focusing our attention on the tick talk at the end of time that becomes a media black hole and sucks everything into it or we can turn our attention to nature and there is infinite wisdom in nature and in deciding who we want to become we need to look at where our attention is going and deciding in observing how we're becoming what we're becoming the first step is to look at where your attention is going I mean smartphone addiction for example it's quite simple pay attention to what you're doing you know pay attention to how you feel pay attention to why you're doing the things you do it's harder than it sounds but it's a very simple direction and the same thing applies for systems and institutions pay attention to what we're optimizing for and what we're producing we talked earlier about externalities and ecosystem services and idea preservation of nature through economics that is a type of attention and it may be flawed in the sense that it's incomplete or it's kind of a step out of a direction of total ignorance of nature and it isn't a complete step but it is a way of moving attention in a different direction and so to put it in terms of magic it is attention based it is like you know where the attention is paid that is what flourishes so I'm not here to tell people what we should become I'm here to tell people how to pay attention to what you're becoming how to use your attention to become what you want to be and how to see the systems that are interpolating you through the way that you they either capture your attention or pay attention to you so that's I guess where I would put that it's not a nice pat answer and it's really ecologically derived in the sense that it involves self-protection self-preservation and autonomy and maintenance of our autonomy and responsibility for our autonomy but this to me is that this Aquarian Age right is like we go from being cared for by the system by the patriarchy by the church by the government and some people experience it as care others as oppression sometimes both but we as these institutions break down now we are responsible for ourselves in a way that we always have been in nature and that doesn't mean we're not part of collective since I mean we don't work together it just means that when it comes to which poisons your ingesting you have to be the facilitator of your own health that's beautiful just because I am trying to enact this show in an ecological rhizomatic way who else do you think would be great to invite into this or like who else is a poison I should be drinking as we like build out what will at some point be embedded in a language model that sort of speaks as a transect of all of the people I've spoken with who do we not want to miss in that scan lovers that's a really good question my friend Nora Khan is a great thinker on AI and culture and art I mean have you had Eric on Eric Davis I will ask Eric Davis for sure I think you know I guess it's a question of like maybe getting into specifics of what is it artists is it academics but those are a couple of people that come to mind I know some artists that could potentially be interesting but artists can sometimes be quite a sense to speak I'm much more of a blabber mouth well I appreciate that I mean obviously you're not alone I will say given the framing that I'm hoping that this helps build relationships in what will become a wizard school for the age of AI and given Tyson Jungkaporta's suggestion that I make sure to counterweight the natural sort of talking to people I know really well and who's work I know really well and you know people like me saying I mean he specifically said talk to women talk to elders which has always been explicit in this I want this series to be ontologically queer right who are people that aren't getting heard who deserve to be heard well it depends on which space you're talking about I mean I think if you were talking about ontological queerness Paul presciato is definitely somebody I would you know on the European continent maybe a little hard to get to but definitely somebody who's got a very thought through vision of the future around the politics of the body you know post hormonal trends world and there's a concept from tester junkie of the pharmacopornographic capitalist regime which I think has always been an inspiring vision to me in terms of how to frame what's going on there I'd be happy to talk more about it yeah I can think of some more people I appreciate it we don't need to linger here yeah tennrick thank you so much for being on this I hope this is fun for people to listen to as it was to actually record well thank you for the invitation I had a great time thank you for listening humans on the loop is made possible thanks to small grants cosmos institute and urchinas the ventures gifts from imaginal seeds and bit tensor and paid subscriptions from hundreds of wonderful people who believe we can dream better together if you would like the world to know that you support the provision of public goods and the promotion of wisdom in technology with tax deductible strategic partnerships email humans on the loop at broton.me for more info ordinary mortals subscribe at humansontheloop.com from our podcasts writing art and a link to wisdom and technology discord server and become a patron if you love kids they've inspired me to write some forthcoming animated robot film reviews our next episode on February 5th we'll be with Jessica Clark founder and executive director of dot connector studio the philadelphia based strategy and foresight firm committed to the vision of a justice society she's awesome the conversation is awesome I look forward to sharing it with you until then take care share the show of your son's pirate and effort attention is our greatest natural resource