Just Published: 'The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition', International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

 

Pix credit here

 For those who may be interested in emerging issues touching on artificial intelligence (AI), its essence and the consequences for human interaction, I am pleased to announce that my article, 'The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human” Condition', has been published in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law (Springer Nature). My great thanks to the staff at IJSL and Anne Wagner (Université de Lille), IJSL's editor in Chief, for her unwavering support through the long process of drafting and publication. As part of the Springer Nature Content Sharing Initiative, I may publicly share full-text access to a view-only version of the work using the following SharedIt link: 

https://rdcu.be/dyRgd

The article focuses on what ought to be emerging questions about the nature of AI (as an object, process, platform, and entity), its (their) autonomy, the nature of consciousness in virtual spaces, and the challenges these issues pose for contemporary efforts to manage or control human interactions with these emerging forms of (autonomous) consciousness, in their contemporary manifestations as law and policy. The article is built around an interactive review of my friend and mentor, Jan M. Broekman's book,  Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023). 

Pix Credit here

The principal underlying point is simple enough--the constitution of virtual spaces has upended the ancient and quite rich context in which humans have sought to understand themselves and the world around them through self-centering philosophies (including theological ones, which inevitably place the human at the center of world rationalizing constructs) as the central "subject" in the constitution of human usable reality. In place of an endogenous or (divinely attached) exogenous dialectical inter-subjectivity (the ordering of subjectivities within human collectives or as human collectives depending on one's taste) that produces order and change or progress (again depending on how collectives "spin" this towards something or other (utopia, stability, fulfillment, it doesn't really matter) one now encounters two distinct types of virtual subjects. 

Pix credit here

The first are constructed as virtual reconstructions of the human, which can be used to describe either individual or collective behaviors (through machine learning descriptive analytics) or can be used to experiment with either (predictive analytics and modeling human individual or collective social systems). This is the "Sim City " style version of virtual subjectivity. The second are constructed as autonomous virtual animations of what starts as a minimally formed virtual consciousness that are used to displace, in a sense, the human. That displacement can occur at any level--from determining the outcome (and managing the forms ) of calculations, to decision making about virtually anything. The virtual consciousness does not ask permission to think, though it may be unable to actualize its determinations.  This is the "Robocop" version, in its humanized form; or in its human nightmare forms apparitions like "Skynet" or the 'Machineverse' in "Matrix."

In both cases, the rise of virtual subjects changes the point of reference for analytics.  The centuries long effort of focus the foundations of meaning and the ordering of human collectives around the ordering notions of "balance sheets"--the values-reducing picture of a human or a human collective in a single point in time--and then from that assumptions developing the complexities of rules based ordering are now being challenged. That challenge is coming from what might be understood as the refocus on what Jan Broekman calls 'the flow' (and I call the 'signal') and accounting  calls the income statement--the summaries of action in the spaces between these frozen images of human and collective (physical/virtual/mirroring/autonomous) realities. The iterative behaviors of change between pints of cognition of those changes, rather than the points themselves, are now more likely to be useful points for understanding a world reality of constant interactivity among its physical and virtual subjects. 

The consequences may be important, and those consequences are explored in the context of current efforts to "regulate" AI. The principal underlying point is also simple enough to state: one cannot successfully regulate iterative interactions in motion by recourse to a set of mechanisms and tools that were useful when collective social relations were merely human. That is like powering nuclear plants with people generating energy by riding on bicycles.  One cannot control AI, nor "own" it merely by waving a bit of text at it and threatening it with uniformed humans engaging in the performative encounters of text and act. In the context of virtual and autonomous intersubjectivity, regulation is always chasing an object that is long gone by the time it is brought within its performative spaces.  That may provide some comfort to those who believe (and not incorrectly) that the theater of public action is somehow socially reassuring and stability enhancing--but it has little to do with the actualities of its object. That result is more powerfully invoked when the regulatory object is autonomous. Perhaps, the best one can realize using these mechanisms is something that approaches the modalities of self-control individual and collective). One can regulate individual and social contact with AI, and especially in its generative and autonomous forms. One can punish individuals and collectives that break the taboos of contact and use. One can, in effect, code limits and stops; one can "turn off the machine" perhaps (that is avoid using it). But one cannot do much more. It follows that consequential regulation--prescriptive rules for human actors--are, at this point in time, the more likely to produce some measure of success.  Prescriptive rules for autonomous and generative intelligence remains, elusive, even in the language of code.  

Perhaps here the ancients can be helpful in the story of Odysseus and the Sirens (Homer, The Odyssey Book XII)--they could not be avoided, their power was irresistible, an for human that meant one of two courses--to shut oneself off from their sound, or to tie oneself so that as powerful as the siren song was one was physically incapable of responding. That, most likely, is the relevant foundation for lawmaking in this emerging era of autonomous virtual intelligence--a measure of freedom through self restraint; the sirens are beyond governance (explored in a constitutional context in Gunther Teubner and Anna Beckers, Expanding Constitutionalism (Ind. J. Global L. Stud. 2013)).

Pix credit here Ulysses and the Sirens, painting by John William Waterhouse

 

The Abstract follows below. Again, SharedIt link: https://rdcu.be/dyRgd

 

2. The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, and the “Human”
3. 3  Condition: An Encounter with Jan M. Broekman, Knowledge
4. 4  in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham,
5. 5  Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2023)
6. 6  Larry Catá Backer1
7. 7  Accepted: 16 October 2023
8. 8  © Springer Nature B.V. 2024
9. 9  Abstract
10. 10  Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-
11. 11  called “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.”) and generative predictive analytics and its
12. 12  models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the
13. 13  quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based
14. 14  intelligence. Humans are compelled to do this because they have trained them-
15. 15  selves it believe that nothing exists unless it is rendered meaningful in relation to the
16. 16  human itself. Beyond that—nothing is worth knowing. It is only to the extent that
17. 17  other selves, even those created by humanity, relate to humans, that they become
18. 18  of interest—and most be regulated, possessed, controlled, and managed—with
19. 19  respect to its interaction with or use by humans. Still, the human self-projection into
20. 20  the digital, and now more consciously the world around them, produces profound
21. 21  changes in the way that the human (and humanity) understands themselves and the
22. 22  way they order the world they inhabit. This work explores the semiotic trajectories
23. 23  made inevitable by the rise of projections of the human into digital plains, and by
24. 24  the possibility of the attainment by those projections of sentient autonomy. It under-
25. 25  takes that exploration through a deep dialectic engagement with Jan Broekman’s,
26. 26  Knowledge in Change: The Semiotics of Cognition and Conversion (Cham, Switzer-
27. 27  land: Springer Nature, 2023). Following the structure and analytics of Broekman’s
28. 28  book, this work critically engages with and seeks to burst through the semiotic bar-
29. 29  riers of the movement of philosophy away from a unitary conception of the subject
30. 30  through the fracturing of the self, the rise of the plural self, and the emergence of the
31. 31  triadic self/self-E/subject. It then pushes the insights that Broekman develops fur-
32. 32  ther—up and out of the human. It animates Broekman’s insights and considers the
33. 33  possibility of semiotic objectivity connected to but autonomous of the human, point-
34. 34  ing to a pathway for the liberation of the autonomous generative virtual self from its
35. 35  human (fractured) subjectivity. In the process it exposes for order complexities and
36. 36  challenges, for the human, of efforts to regulate or engage with, not the generative
37. 37  autonomous “artificial intelligences” humanity created in its own image, but rather

Vol.:(38  the use of those systems by humans and their effects in the human semiosphere. The

38. 39  consequences for regulatory approaches are then outlined.

43. 43  Keywords Artificial intelligence · Phenomenology · Semiotics · Data governance
44. 44  post-modern · Cognition · Autonomy · Regulatory measures