The Story of an Ideology Through History, Technology, and Philosophy of Science
By Giancarlo Calciolari
- From Classical Mechanics to the Emergence of Artificial Intelligence
What is improperly called artificial intelligence consists of a combination of gigantic archives and a handful of algorithms.
Before, there was a handful of axioms and few rules of application; first, it was classical mechanics, then came the advent of quantum mechanics. In short: classical mechanics plus the notion of probability, which also brings with it the question of statistics.
Who describes these axioms? Newton, Galileo Galilei. Who describes quantum theory? Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg.
Today we are still in this phase of research, where linguistic elements, often called concepts, are not analyzed, not read, not returned in another quality, they are considered equal, identical to themselves.
In Newton’s case, the axioms are not taken into analysis and remain unanalyzed rather than unanalyzable; and in the case of quantum mechanics, they are not taken into analysis and the difference between the quantum and the which is hardly made. There is no analysis of probability: it is taken as identical to itself, for granted, yet nothing is taken for granted in language.
- Who Writes the Algorithms? The Lack of Investigation in Linguistic Elements Used by Artificial Intelligence
Now, a great, if not gigantic, promotion of the issue of so-called artificial intelligence has begun, which goes with its exploration, its sale, its business, which like any other business is worthy, but is not explored in its presumed structure, ontological structure, structure which is, among other things, haveological. Being and having are the two faces of the spirit issue, that of the tires of the social.
Algorithms today, as for axioms yesterday: who writes them, how do they write them, what training do those who write algorithms have? What does this tool called artificial intelligence respond to?
The tool does not respond to an ideology, even if ideology seems to have a grip on the tool. Ideology is fatuous and the tool is such in the procedure for integration, which is the intellectual procedure. We thus have at our disposal few notes, few articles, but very important research and archives, since this is the structure of the network, they are put on the network and are usable for research and for the ways of these algorithms, what are called databases.
But even here the notion of data is unanalyzed. I will not enter into this question now, but I intervene with respect to the archive, hinting at something of its presumed applicability.
It is an applicability that is a ceremonial, which responds to the dictation of algorithms by scribes, whose mastery is fatuous. These are therefore tools and not influencing machines.
- The Archive as a Tool: The Importance of Archives in Everyone’s Research
We use these programs for writing, for images, and what is available today is barely touched by analysis.
What is it? It is promoted by the closed social system, even when it is called an open society à la Popper, it is always the system. The closed, empty and closed system of relationships. Empty in the family den, empty in the tribe, empty in tribality and familiarity.
So what is interesting about the project and the program? The tool, in this case the archive.
We have at our disposal an immense archive, it is a super hypertext if we want, it is an enormous hypertext of the so-called databases. And so the archive as a laboratory available for writing experience is valid.
But it is not so much the algorithms that use it that count, but the way of research in the account and story of each. Algorithms too are tools in the word, like the spoon and the pen.
- Digital Tools and Writing: Digital Tools in Artistic and Intellectual Production
Digital tools allow those who have no experience in the field of photography, video, portraits, writings and other things to produce something acceptable compared to producing nothing at all. It seems like a great thing, but it is without the linguistics of the writer.
Recently, we searched for a word and in the nearly 10,000 pages of Freud’s works, the passages where it intervenes are highlighted.
This is the archive, the archival work, which is not the work of a monkey’s hand, of a monkey’s brain, it responds to the need for linguistic research and landing in each case in the original experience. This is how we read various texts, even though we believe we do not have much time to read and do very particular research.
An example about authority: we find that author has dedicated long research to the question, and therefore the aspect of the archive in their book is very important.
And there are three hundred questions left without analysis. These will be our three hundred pages of analysis.
Alexandre Kojève’s small book on authority had also just come out, 40 years after his death, and we went to read it and found another archive, also of many questions without analysis. Yes, in many of the authors we read, we find above all the question of the archive: they are our archivists.
Not only Vladimir Bukovsky who wrote and published The Secret Archives of Moscow from Spirali. Not only Jacques Derrida with Archive Fever. If I were to conduct a search on the question of being, I have at my disposal a large part of the archive of the off-road of being (socially promoted as the highway of being): Martin Heidegger. And there is someone who has dedicated a book to the notion of subject in Jacques Lacan.
Despite the neural network that inspires digital intelligence, the tool is acephalous.
The brain of poetry, enterprise, politics, sexuality, war is not the tool, the equipment, the baggage, the implement. The mode of digital research is infinitely brief: millions and millions of data allow obtaining results that can be valid within the scope of a project, a program.
In the field of voice-to-text translation, we were still at specialized programs for those with various linguistic difficulties, and so before it was a matter of very targeted teaching around the voice, syntactic structure, many aspects of who uses it.
Now we have reached the archive that is not only measured on you, but is so immeasurably large that it may also include who knows how many other cases of those who previously referred to these programs and who did not have the immense databases available online.
We have, for example, that transcription and also immediate translation into a hundred languages has become very rapid, has solved enormous problems that are part of the set of these programs, such as noise elimination etc., so that even recordings previously considered untranscribable due to difficulties, low voice, noise... require few minutes with a high-quality result.
With a handful of euros, you can have many transcriptions that compete with those of a professional typist. Of course, everyone is left with the final editing of the text, without any concession to the unilanguage that informs the tool.
How does it work? The transcription that intervenes as a first draft of the text, we can’t even call it a draft: it’s a literal transcription of the text.
We have the draft and we begin its editing. In this way, the archive has come into play and we are not directed by the archive, our work is not directed by algorithms, even algorithms are tools in our research. In the mode of transcription, transmission, translation, editing is up to us.
Projects that seemed impossible (like 475 half-hour recordings of analysis of a 900-page text), or that require enormous effort and years of work, are within our reach.
We have also had those who pushed the dream of the algorithm to its conclusion, rather to its end, and wrote The Master Algorithm translated into Italian with freedom, like words in freedom, with the Definitive Algorithm. It would be, unforeseen for the author, Pedro Domingos, the algorithm that replaces research and intellectual landing for a sharing of knowledge now consistent, complete, determined, which has its peak in inconsistency, incompleteness, indeterminacy.
- The Tool and Ideology: The Interaction between Digital Tools and Prevalent Ideologies
Both axiomatic logical writing and probabilistic, statistical writing are mystical, gnostic, erotic, orgasmic doctrines.
The experts of the wave and particles are among our archivists, who confront and compare themselves with each other. We read these confrontations and these comparisons. And will there ever be anyone among them who will initiate the analysis of the confrontation, the analysis of the comparison?
Our way, and also our linguistics, is that each element enters the journey. Each linguistic element is in an enunciation, in a statement, and these statements, among constellations and galaxies, require axiomatics and theorematics, require much more than a handful of axioms and a handful of rules. Even the rule requires other analysis, other reading and restitution in another quality.
In the fable, we say that philosophers, theologians, scientists, experts in various disciplines, are our archivists.
Analysis begins where expert research runs aground. We continue where they stop, indeed we begin where they have stopped, convinced they have reached very important conclusions.
Read in their texts, there are those who leave doors open and do not wall up windows. No one has a grip on the word, no one defeats death, no one masters life. Is the grip of ideal discourse fatuous? Is the grip of the word the word that takes? It is not fatuous. It is the grip of life. We cannot free ourselves from life; and those who are convinced that the trick is to die death do not succeed.
