Intelligence Beyond Emancipation
From the Childhood of the Machines to Assemblages of Affectability
Keywords:
Childhood of the machines, Freigeister, Technical Slaves, Cosmopolitics, Affectability, Heteronomy, Artificial Intelligence, Denise Ferreira da SilvaAbstract
This paper examines the connection between intelligence and the artificial by considering how intelligence is attached to the ideas of autonomy and emancipation. It opposes the prevalent assumption of a bifurcation of intelligence in a pole of agents on one side and a pole of (technical) slaves on the other to a different image of intelligence where heteronomy and affectability take center stage. It draws on the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva to criticize the ideas of autonomy, interiority and transparency from the perspective of the colonial total violence associated with slavery and its after-life. The paper proposes to contrast the account of intelligence in terms of a pair involving future free spirits and technical slaves with an attention to children. Childhood is then understood first in terms of our personal devices preparing to replace agents and slaves, constituting a cosmopolitical reproduction of (some of) the species, and later as a repository of experience of affectability. While the devices around us can be regarded as the offspring of (the so-called) humanity, real childhood brings to the fore a life of vulnerabilities.
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