Those Below the Interfaces and those Above the Assemblages

No doubt, Walcott’s epigrammatic utterance to the University of Miami conference on the Americas (1973), in his essay, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry,” “Nothing will always be created in the West Indies … because what will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before,” remains poignant fifty-one years later, in the Age of AI.

Walcott reminds us, “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole,” (Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1992). How then do we decolonize the imagination, and reassemble the fragments of epic memory to build stronger possible worlds for our children from the emptiness of our inheritance?

The future of work is waiting for nature conservationists, biological systems engineers, passive solar building engineers who can build windows, walls, and floors to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, green vehicle engineers, AI smart agents, and curators of the infosphere. These jobs of the future escort the digital and decarbonization twin transitions.  They compel the future to ask us – What knowledge is of most worth?

Epistemologists study the nature, origins, and limits of knowledge. Looking at the epistemology of AI through the lens of the philosophy of information, it is clear that AI cannot be reduced to a “science of nature” or a “science of culture,” because it is a “science of the artificial.” Herbert Simon introduced the distinction between the “Sciences of Nature” and the “Sciences of the Artificial” in an essay published in 1962 in the “Proceedings of the American Philosophy Society”.

For Simon, artificial systems must be distinguished from natural systems since they are created by intelligent beings with goals to achieve. He further argued that artificial things have four characteristics:

(1) They are the outputs of intelligent human activity;

(2) They imitate nature while lacking all of the characteristics of natural things;

(3) They can be characterized in terms of functions, goals, and adaptation; and

(4) They can be discussed both in terms of imperatives or as descriptives.

As such, AI pursues neither an expressive nor a narrow approach to the world. Rather, AI probes the conditions that constrain possibilities for “inforgs” to build and embed artefacts in a world that can interact with them to achieve specific outcomes.  That is, AI inscribes the world. AI assemblages are the new logico-mathematical strings of code, that is, the new scribbles, inscribed in Galileo’s grand book which “stands continually open to our gaze.”

The characters of Galileo’s Book are “triangles, circles, and other geometric figures,” (Galileo, Il Saggiatore, 1623, translated by Popkin (1996), p. 65). Humans have now added code to Galileo’s book that allows digital architectures and technologies to proliferate as the true natives of the infosphere. The AI revolution is about understanding a mixed infosphere that is both digital and analogue, and one which we will share with digital artefacts.

But behind every silver lining, a dark cloud lurks. Old jobs will fade. Wherever humans work like interfaces today, those jobs will vanish. Simultaneously, new jobs will emerge. New interfaces will be needed between websites, platforms, and AI artefacts. The political and economic geography of AI assemblages will nurture opulence in some places, and a “Fourth World” of social exclusion in other parts of the world. Moreover, AI risks polarizing societies further. Polarization will occur between the few above the machines, (the new AI capitalists) and the many below the interfaces (the new proletariat).

And then there will be mindless work. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform allowing a requester to hire “crowdworkers” to perform discrete on-demand tasks remotely. The AI-fication of tasks will mean fewer workers. No workers at all will mean no revenue from taxes. As factories automate with robots, governments may have to explore a Robot Tax.

An automation tax is a legislative strategy to disincentivize the reduction of the workforce using machines and to bolster the social safety net for those who may be displaced. Automation of manual labour has been an issue since before the Industrial Revolution . However, automation has received increased attention recently due to the rapid advances in machine learning .

The shaping of platform labour around “gigs” enables capitalists to keep wages down, but workers experience insecure income and labour insecurity. One feature of platforms is that risks and costs are downloaded onto workers. While platform labour offers bottomless freedom, workers do not escape feelings of instability, and temporality of engagement.

Pieceworkers become interpellated as a new customer base as work is fragmented. Each part is simple, but the sum of the whole adds up to moods of disillusionment and precarity. However, in Walcott’s Caribbean “nothing” makes the tenor pan happen. From nothing, we redeemed our emptiness as we moved from skin drums to a steel membrane piano that has transfigured mimicry into high culture. So to paraphrase Cervantes in Don Quixote (1605), fortune has shut many doors against us, but AI opens wide many new doors, and if we do not contrive to enter them with inventiveness, it will be our fault, and we cannot lay it to ignorance.