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An Argument for an Ecosystemic AI: Articulating Connections across Prehuman and
Posthuman Intelligences
#MMPMID34723110
Hg Solomon L
; Baio C
Int J Community Wellbeing
2020[]; 3
(4
): 559-584
PMID34723110
show ga
As an art collective Cesar & Lois develops projects that examine sociotechnical
systems, attempting to challenge anthropocentric technological pathways while
linking to intelligences sourced in biological circuitry. As artists we imagine
new configurations for what we understand as (social, economic, technological)
networks and intelligences. With this ecosystemic approach we consider the
possibility of an artificial intelligence (AI) that supports well-being in a
broad sense, accommodating relationships across different layers of living worlds
and involving local and global communities of all kinds. This thinking is
grounded in research by theorists across disciplines, including communications
and media theory, microbiology, anthropology, decolonial studies, social ecology,
sociology and environmental psychology. At a time when human beings and their
ecosystems face grave threats due to climate change and a global pandemic, we are
rethinking the basis for our AIs, and for the resulting decision-making on behalf
of societies and ecosystems. Creative projects by Cesar & Lois provide
alternative conceptual models for thinking across networks, reframing the
artists' and potentially viewers' understanding of what motivates and shapes
societies. Referencing a series of artworks and the theories that underpin them,
this article envisages a sociotechnical framework that takes into account
ecosystems and challenges the philosophical orientations that guide society.
Degenerative Cultures is an artwork in which the artists overlap microbiological
organisms, AI and human systems as a speculative restructuring of networks across
human and nonhuman entities. The push for ecosystemic technologies and
intelligences is linked to the expansion of community to include planetary
constituents, such as nonhuman beings and environments. The artists posit that
such ecosystemic networks would be capable of taking into account the planet's
human societies as well as nonhuman species and their environments, broadening
the concept of community well-being and shifting the technological architecture
to meet the complex needs of the planet and its constituent parts. The
experimental series, [ECO]nomic Revolution, layers Physarum polycephalum, or
slime mold, over the mapped demographics of human cities. The species
polycephalum references multi-brains, and implies a decentralized logic, which
for the non-neurological microbiological network translates to the sharing of
nutrients and regulated growth across a culture. Assuming a perspective based in
the arts, this proposition imagines a shift from the dominant conceptions of AI
as an individual intelligence and frames it as part of a network that necessarily
includes ecosystems. We envision the creation of sociotechnical systems that
could be modeled on networked lifeforms that have optimized themselves across
millions of years, like the organism Physarum polycephalum, which occurs globally
in moist environments, or like those microbial populations within and outside of
human bodies, whose percussive biological processing interacts with and alters
many layers of lifeforms. We argue that an environmentally responsive
intelligence based on relationships across living systems potentially serves a
broad community composed of diverse human populations, nonhuman beings and
ecosystems.
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