The 'Phantasy of Artificial Intelligence'

Jean Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime reads like a dire warning about technology as an ‘extreme phenomenon’ from way back in ‘96, similar to pieces we can find today, relentlessly scaremongering about AI, though rather more idiosyncratic, philosophical and French.

Yet there’s another message within it which we tend to hear less often nowadays. The clue is in the title: we are habitually deluding ourselves when we imagine ourselves capable of criminal perfection.

 

And so it is with our tech fantasies. We manifest curiosity and then a creative flirtation with all the interesting possibilities, which we should, before powerful radicals nearly always muscle in with a bid to impose a more consummate vision of the goal, transcending any cost/benefit analysis.

For Baudrillard, this urge to leave behind all trace of corporeal constraint is an inevitable recurring feature of our condition…the original imperfect crime.

There’s a lingering ambivalence: he refers to AI as the ‘achieved utopia of thought’ whilst tacitly acknowledging that all utopias are places we are doomed never to reach, set up by radical language that is dangerously disconnected from reality.

Yet try we do, and the result is a cycle of ‘appearance and disappearance’ between materality and its dopplegänger.

On any final approach to the Truth — the ‘highest definition’ — we seem to grasp that the best version of the message is not sitting at the end point of the journey, by which time some sort of ‘crazy sophistication’ has set in.

And so we recoil.

(Viz all those doomed attempts to impose either 3D or Ultra-HD on our movie experiences.)

“The phantasy of Artificial Intelligence, of the brain’s becoming a world, the world’s becoming a brain, so as to function without bodies, unfailing, autonomised, inhuman. Too intelligent too superhuman to be true. There is in fact no room for both natural and artificial intelligence. There is no room for both the world and its double.”