Okay, welcome back. Thank you for staying. So this is going to be a panel discussion with audience participation as well. What we'd like to do is first of all introduce the panel again more formally. We have my right, Warren Sack from UC Santa Cruz and he is not just a professor but also the chair of media. Film and digital media. media and Warren is a visual artist and computer scientist that sometimes also say and you work in the field of sort of computational visual theory as well as practice. Is that...? Yeah well and just say that I'll be back. Yeah I was just going to add that.
Your book is coming out or is out? No no next fall. Next fall okay called the Software Arts and Warren is going to be giving a talk and presentation based on of a book in our History and Theory of the Media series March 1st. And it will be over in the History of, or the Science Centre over in Stevens Hall March 1st. So it's on the poster and we'll be advertising that. And then I'll also just introduce again Luciana Parisi who's a professor here, year visiting professor in rhetoric and also teaches in digital media culture at Goldsmiths and has published two books. I'm forgetting the title of the first one but I know that it is on the topic of cyborgs and... No, it's called abstract space. Okay, sorry. The last
one which I do know is called Contagious Architecture and it's on questions of computation and space and so sorry about that. I just don't have my notes with me. So I'm going to give them a chance to talk a little bit about the themes and you as well to follow up on some of the interesting questions that came up in the discussion of this paper. And then we'll open up to some of the audience as well. And just briefly before we start, the title I gave about the Ecologies of Mind was really just to kind of open up some of the issues around the vision of the digital today and the sense of how important Bateson's work was as Duke was I think really spelling out quite nicely in the discussion after his own talk and and I
know that Luciana in particular has been thinking a lot about what she calls media aesthetics and maybe ecology of mind in an indirect way but especially in the digital era how the mind was enmeshed more and more in these digital environments and I didn't again want to stress Bateson's techno-optimism but I do think that he had a very interesting way as Luke was mentioning of thinking about networks of people and technologies as kind of creative epistemological subjects in a way that's much more complex than some of the techno networks that we're forced into today to put it that way so what I'd like to do is maybe start with Luciana who's been thinking about these questions for a long time
in different different ways and I'll pass it over to Luciana who will talk for maybe like five minutes or so and then stop me okay well I'll stop you only if it's absolutely necessary okay so here's Luciana thank you thank you very much thank you for having me thank you for hosting me this year I'm having great fun in Berkeley. This is my first time here as a new professor and I'm teaching two classes and I'm really enjoying the engagement with students and the thrill and the kind of opening to this kind of question. It seems almost the relation between the humanities and the sciences and come to a place where it's permeated with technological enterprise.
But it seems to me that because you guys are so enmeshed within it, it's almost when I teach my classes, especially in undergraduate classes, it seems the students have a moment of suspension, say, oh, yes, we are living in this, we are the product of this. but it's precisely because I come from the outside and I continue that I can see how much transparent has become the question of what I call automated cognition or the automation reason. One of the ways I got interested in new media as a form of articulating modes of the sensible and
intelligible. By which I mean not just the kind of understanding of media as instruments of representation or instruments of illustration or some kind of mean of communication. I understand media more as machines, as some kind of possibility of looking into the question of technology or logic of technique or logic of mediation. That's what I'm interested in. How do these mediating processes have been accelerated, intensified, transformed with this moment,
especially that is for me an important historical moment, i.e. the automation of reason, which for me happened in the 1940s with cybernetics and with computation. We have already mentioned today various forms of understanding of the mind or understanding of cognition through Turing for Newman, of course Wiener and un-system theory, in the second order of cybernetic, there's such a rich history, but for me I really am interested in this moment of origination, a genesis of the technologic or the logical machine, the way mediation became no longer, was no longer attributed to some kind of optical
representation. What happens with the cybernetic and computational mediation, of course they're very different but I really do believe that we are definitely the product, that the mediatic system we are in mesh today is the product of this conjunction between cyber medicine and computation, despite a different history we can trace. But I really think that the language of, you know, even if it can be visual, it's definitely not optical and the language of this kind of the mode of mediation we are talking about has to do with the relationships in algorithms and data. For me, there is a tradition within media theory or media philosophy, a German tradition that would argue that even software, even algorithms, even programming
language are always already embedded in the material constitution. I'm talking about Fred very Kittler school, where media are understood as tools, tools related to other tools, and therefore it kind of pushes forward their understanding of philosophy of media, knowledge through media, process of mediation as embedded within these kind of information systems whereby there is almost no abstraction, there is almost no moment of thinking thinking about the machine or where the tool almost does the thinking. So there's this kind of flattening, for lack of a better word, between the mind and mediation,
between modes of cognition and modes of mediation. So the process of mediation, which is this informatic model of mediation determined by the language of computation and cybernetics gives a model of thinking directly. And it's a model of thinking that refuses any kind of transcendentalism, any kind of general capacity of thinking of or articulating mediation as instead a process of distancing, reflection, awareness. In other words, it's not a Kantian model of mediation, it's an
Ategredian model of mediation. On the other hand, so for me this is interesting because Because one could argue, okay, one can develop a history of media, technology, immigration as a mode of informing what has been called an extended cognition or modes of decisions that are artificial. They are not extension of the human brain. I mean, that's what is interesting for me of that school is this kind of capacity of articulating an autonomy of the technical machine that is not made in the figure of human brain. So that's what the German school of media does for us. And so far as politics
is concerned, of course, the kind of extension of politics to technique or thinking of technique, politics of the KNE is something that one can recuperate through them. But what is limiting of this tradition is that it doesn't allow for any kind of understanding of capacity of thinking of machine thinking beyond what they do, beyond their function. So we have model of automation that is exactly related to this idea of the empobrishment of philosophy, the empobrishment of politics, where modes of machine cognition are just related to this
form of non-conscious cognition or non-reflexive or just functional. And that's where we can't really ask the question of politics because that's where the blockage to me comes because then if decisions are made without the mind, without reflection or without reason, if politics is just the result of a behaviour determined by rules, that's all we do, we obey rules, these rules are described as these algorithmic machines where we just adapt to the rule of the decision making of algorithms, then we can't have politics. Because politics has
to do with police, has to do with the construction of collective knowledge, has to do with the discernment between the right and the wrong. The political is very much the realm of human culture. So obviously with this conception of machines as being just information systems that determine the impoverishment of thinking, of reason and also of politics. So we are not, there's no way, we can't go anywhere there. For me it's just impossible to talk about politics with this frame. It's a frame that eliminates the political question, because the political question needs to be outside because these automated forms of cognition are unable to
discern, are unable to decide, are unable to reflect, there is no reason there and you know politics has to do the reason and you know of course we know the various you know various forms of period of political reason we can just think about you know Agamben, Ranciere, Deleuze, Fagou we have all these different forms of political decision, English meaning included, where you do need reason, you do need reflection, even in the less it's a form of sensibility, but nonetheless, you know, it's an imminent politics has to do with experience, but certainly it does have to do with computation, and certainly computation is not what we can do, unless we use the machine.
So unless you have a politics in terms of instrumentality or use of the machine or potentiality of the machine, you don't have politics. Or unpacking the potential of the machine, reversing engineering the machine, engineering and coupling the machine. With this kind of model, theoretical model, you don't have politics. What I said I'm interested in doing is to, especially because I think that the modes of automation that we encounter today are actually different. They are epochal in terms of what Yuki was pointing out before. They can no longer be thought in terms of mechanical automation.
They can no longer be thought in terms of the repetition of initial condition. They can no longer be thought in terms of expression of function or accomplishment of tasks. And the reason for this is because if you look at the kind of logic that this kind of information and computational system have adopted during the years, you see this kind of burning question question from the very origin of cybernetics and computation, which is the question of how do we compute what we don't know? So the very initial question of the limit of computation, which is you don't know when a computational process stops, you can't
devise a universal language that will resolve all the problems, is exactly what has pushed the scientific enterprise, if you want to say with Elizabeth Stengers, which is an open enterprise, epistemologically open enterprise, to actually explain, but also to invent the question of computation in terms of learning from the outside, learning from contingency, learning from not what is already being programmed, but learning as surprise. And that's where Bateson comes back in terms of information is what makes information,
so that information is surprise, even ego and shunning. So for me there's this kind of question within the history of computational information theory where the logic of computational operation has always been driven towards the prediction or the prevention or the anticipation or at least the dealing with it's outside. So it's outside sometimes in my work I call it the incomputable, drawing from some scientific theory, from Turing, of course, and then reworking of the Incomputable in Contemporary Information Theory in the work of Gregory Chaitlin. So the Incomputable... if we want to kind of really
re-articulate politics from within the machine, not just in this kind of ephemeral act of trying to reverse the machine as if the machine was just a tool that leads to another tool to another tool then I guess the the challenge would have been how to think of a possibility, a temporal possibility perhaps, perhaps a metaphysical possibility within the machine of unwwriting its own code, erasing its own program. It's almost like you need to twist a little bit the approach rather than thinking about computational machines as this governmental mode of decision making,
you think about the computation machine as limited or as the opportunity of entering into another time or into another space because I think space is also important and the special temporal articulation that we are envisioning if you want to talk about politics of the future are not the same we are already living in this special temporal dimension and it's not just because of social media because there are some kind of production of time and space through algorithms, through algorithms and data, through metadata, big data, algorithms and hardware, that are somehow becoming opaque or transparent to us, but nonetheless are writing the political formation of what it means to be, you know, subjectivity, what it means about political subjectivity today.
So for me the task is to rethink instrumentality, to rethink this kind of process, this mediating process. And I think you mentioned Kant and the organism, I think I'm working more in terms of the transcendental logic and the pure reason because I think that there is already a gesture towards articulating how do we make sense of the world or what we don't know and how this needs necessarily to be a process that in the mediation of the real needs to step out from what you already know so from this deductive model but also needs to not just to rely on what is there. What do I mean by that?
and probably I'll have to finish. The logical computation that we are living today is neither deductive or neither purely deductive, i.e. based on axions that are executed, neither is merely inductive, i.e. it draws from the data that we input in the system. There is a capacity of the logic of computation to exceed its own mechanism, its own function, its own doing and that's where I think there is a promise of machine thinking or machine reasoning that obviously needs to be re-articulated not just in terms of the image of man that can't propose it to us but needs to be re-articulated so that we can understand or we can analytically
unpack the modes of decision that are so transparent and invisible to us today. Thank you. Thanks. Does this work? Yeah. So, I want to introduce some terms in order to talk about what I think is a central problematic and what we're discussing today, which is really technology and politics. And the terms that I'm going to introduce are simply work language and machine language. And the reason why I want to introduce this is because in all of these discussions we're talking about technology,
we're talking about machines, we're talking about specific kinds of technology and machines like an algorithm. And what I want to point out is that there's a whole bubble of terms that go around each of these terms. There's a discourse of each. So looking at these things, I introduce these two constructs. One is a work language, and the other is a machine language. And so I want to define work language to mean the language, the text, and talk employed to describe the processes and the products of work. So, for instance, we can do what Max Weber did. We can look at the writings of Benjamin Franklin and say,
early to bed, early to rise, makes men healthy, wealthy, and wise. Ben Franklin had a lot to say about work. And we can trace that vocabulary, that discourse, into contemporary corporate organization and say, oh, you know, the spirit of capitalism has very much this Protestantism exemplified by Benjamin Franklin in it. So, each age, each culture, each industry, each economy has one or more work languages, and by examining differences and similarities between these languages, we can interrogate what is work here and now, versus what was work there or then.
Now, in addition to a work language, there are these almost performative qualities of what I'm going to call a machine language. So, machine languages are work languages employed to design and analyze machines. So, to adequately describe how a machine works is tantamount to demonstrating the work to be done in exacting detail. When a machine is designed to replace a human in a work process, the actions performed by the human must be translated into a machine language. So, there's a long history of this kind of writings. Pamela Long, who's a historian of science, points out, you know, this kind of writings about machines, or what we can call writings about the mechanical arts, are very old.
There's Hellenistic engineering books, there's from the same era, books tied to political and military praxis, including Xenophon's Economicus, Roman agricultural writings, you know, it includes medieval guild regulations, collections of craft recipes, And it continues on into today's language of patent law and how-to books, magazines, and websites. So, I want to also say that the newest forms of machine language today include computer programming languages. So, when we're talking about machine languages today, oftentimes we're talking about software, or algorithms.
So, one way to kind of sort this out is to evoke this thing that was a very nice image that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze had, which he more or less proposed that every philosophical system has a set of dramatis persona that are right at the corner of it. So you can almost think it sort of theatrically. Think of what's the theater within each system. So Hegel had the master-slave dialectic, Lacan transposes that, and then we have the mother and the child. We can go to more or less the list of this, we can go to any philosophical system and say,
well, what are the dramatis persona? I assert that this is also the case for work languages and machine languages. And especially when we're talking about contemporary problematics of work and machines, we should look at what are the dramatis persona for information technologies, and what are they for computational technologies. In fact, I'm going to say that information and computation are not the same thing. They actually come from very different areas of work. So I assert that information technologies, the dramatis persona that's at the center of all this,
is a man on a construction site lifting a certain weight, a given weight to a given height. okay so this is still inscribed in contemporary Newtonian mechanics it's we know it is the Newton's second law law force equals mass times acceleration it's it's a it's it's a you see it in contemporary physics and engineering as a vocabulary of work they call it work but I don't know if you've ever if you've ever been a student in an introductory physics class, or you've had to teach it, you know this is really puzzling to a lot of people, because by this definition of work, lifting
a weight to a given height, if I lift my backpack up to here, if I lift my backpack up to the stage, I've done some work. But then if I put it back down, I've just done negative work. Okay? So, it's very odd. It's very odd if, let's say, what you're trying to do is, let's say you work for a carpenter, and your work is to bring him his tools anytime he calls for them, and then bring it back down to the truck. Well, when you get up to him on the second floor, or he's working on that window, you've done work.
But then you take the tool back, you've done zero work. So by the end of the day, you've done exactly zero work. Okay, so this language of work, which we still see in Newtonian mechanics, but we also see in, it develops into thermodynamics. thermodynamics develops into a very specific form of information theory that we know in Shannon and Weaver. It's information, it's entropy, it's what David was referring to, it's the neg entropy and so forth. And what Bernard Stiegler is referring to when he talks about neg entropy. That is quite different than computation. computation. We can see a dramatis persona right at the center of computation in Alan
Turing's 1936 paper where he talks about David Hilbert's so-called decision problem. And the dramatis persona is a figure that we know of, if you look at the history of computation through Western Europe for hundreds of years, as the person who sits in front of a gridded paper and is asked to do arithmetic on certain problems. It's very circumscribed. And sort of at the center of Turing's definition of what we would call an algorithm now, is, he says, what a man can do with a pencil
pencil and a gridded paper, and he only refers to what's on the gridded paper. He can't look outside, okay? And this gets recapitulated in the history of computation. So if you look at Donald Canoe's magisterial multiple volumes on the art of computer programming, this again is the dramatis persona that's at the center of it. Now it's very, as Luciano was saying, it's a very diminished form of reasoning that's going on there. Because this, it's supposedly, an algorithm is defined as the kind of operations that a man with a paper, with a gridded paper and pencil, can do.
So this is supposed to rule out magical steps, like, okay, step one, go back in time. Step two, find Euclid. Step three, ask him what his algorithm is. You're not supposed to be able to do that. But at the same time, it leaves us with a very diminished form of subjectivity. it's just for those of us in the humanities we're going to ask what is the average man? what do you mean by average man? that's at the center of computer science this average man they don't mean Rembrandt they don't mean Shakespeare what a man can do with a pencil
no they mean somebody who's been sitting in front of these tables grinding through these calculations And the history of that is really a history of operations. They're very step-by-step operations. Do this, do this, do this, do this. And that is in this tradition of what Pamela Long talked about. You know, these recipes, these yield recipes, these recipes of how to do things. whole history of, let's call it, operations. Mark Priestley, a historian, has a very nice book just called The Science of Operations, which traces out this whole history. And that's
very distinctive from the history of this other form of work, which we can phrase in terms of functions. So functions are not the same thing as operations. Functions change radically at the moment of lightness. Go look it up in the OED. Functions before was this just kind of general term of like stuff you do at work, the way operations can be as well. What's your operation here? But then it became very much entangled in analysis or algebra and calculus, let's put it that way. And that's also why the case that computation is not mathematics, it's not at all mathematics. The gap between mathematics and computation
is where computer science oftentimes sits, to try to suture the two together, to try to make computation into something mathematical, because it's a priori not mathematical, it comes from a totally different genealogy. So, the problem is, when we start looking at these work languages and these machine languages, and then we ask a contemporary question like, what is the politics of the algorithm? And again, I'm going to refer back to what Luciano was saying here. you are trying to interrogate a problematic around algorithm that has specifically been pushed to the side
in order to develop our contemporary theory of algorithms. You aren't supposed to... So, first of all, again, the dramatis pertheloma. This is somebody sitting just at their table. They're not communicating with other people. So, at the center of that is a very isolated individual. The other thing is, if you closely read Turing's 1936 paper, he says, okay, there's two kinds of machines. One kind I'm going to call M Machines, where all you do is you, the only thing you consult is the state of the grid and paper in front of you, and the other kind of machines are C Machines,
they're called Choice Machines, where you stop every once in a while and you ask somebody, hey, what should I do now? And you get some input. And he says explicitly, no, I'm just doing the automated machine, machine. I'm not doing the choice machines. And that is where we are. So this is, it's always problematic in a vocabulary of computation, at least now, since Turing, to talk about interaction. And in fact, if you consult the analysis of algorithms, the literature of the analysis of algorithms, people like Knuth explicitly rule out most things we use for computers today from their definition of algorithms. Anything that's interactive,
anything that runs forever, like a website, like your phone, like practically everything we use that has a computer in it, is not an algorithm. So this becomes incredibly problematic. How do we talk about interaction? How do we talk about politics, how do we talk about just notions of coordination if we're going to try to open the algorithm because as soon as we open that box we're left in a work language and a machine language that excludes and has very studiously been designed to exclude all such notions and so
So, you know, we see this constantly being challenged. You can look at the discussions that happened at the Macy conferences with people like Bates in there, putting forward a very different notion of what information is. Differences, information is a difference that makes a difference. That is not at all what actually won out. What out? What won out? Shannon and Weaver's notion. Shannon and Weaver explicitly exclude in their definition of information any correlation with any relation to meaning. Okay, that's a really different thing. So there's cybernetics is one moment when this struggle is happening, but I think this is also a moment.
Second, waves, cybernetics, which very much took place on this campus as well. But this contemporary discussion of what is the politics of technology, especially what is the politics of the algorithm, is an attempt to really cut across the grain. Great, that seems to be really a good opening. Maybe we should open it up to some questions and see what happens, because I think that's a really nice way of asking the question of what's going on when we interact with these automated algorithms and it's not voluntary interaction as well. So maybe some people would like to raise some questions. Mark?
I'm a computer programmer. And so since 1985. And the definition of information engineering is getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Anytime I go into a new client, I'm a cultural change agent. I'm basically looking at the anthropology of the people who are basically doing a word language. and they understand their milieu, I have to come in, drink information from a fire hose, and I have to translate that into the alteration of this existing software system, the building of a new software system. But basically, if I'm not being an anthropologist
and somebody who deals in bits and bytes and machine language basically making sure that the database doesn't get corrupted and all the, you know, and just a myriad of technical things having to do with security, with operations, maintainability, sustainability of the system. This is the milieu that I work in. I work in a human milieu. I basically have to say, who are you? Who are the people? Who are the stakeholders? What's the human community? within which machine repetition, all of the computer science notions have to be basically changed into a cognitive ergonomics.
How do people think about their lives at work? And what can I do to save time, to save money, to basically create the workflows and interactions in a very time and human base. So again, this is a separate question from, am I going to use the algorithm from Knut's fifth book in the third chapter on page 758? There's not a sense that I am making, yes, I do use those algorithms, but most of the interaction is iterative perhaps not recursive but yes it's
recursive it's like does this work no let's fix it does this work no let's fix it does this work no it's it's intense to human it basically takes a whole in fact as a software developer you know it's easy to see the person who just wants to like look at the computer and you know get input and do their job and not talk to people and then you know that might be a program and then a software developer is actually engaged in this in the real world and what is going on with software. So can you, does this, Warren and Luciana, differ from what you're talking about or? Well I would just triangulate it by the question is that of course that
in the contemporary world interaction breaks open the algorithm, but interaction that Luciana is interested in sometimes the negative pull is that the interactions are being manipulated and automated and that that you was talking also about how many of the protensions and anticipations are also being forced and automated and constructed so that that you as a user of the computer is are being are being funneled into certain kinds of behaviors that are being anticipated and constructed so I think that then the question is that the political question if I'm just trying to triangulate the different possibilities is Luciana and we share this idea is that are there machine
possibilities that exceed these automaticities that could be deployed in an interesting way and I think that that Yuc is I'm quite excited about Yuc on this question that I think that you're also exploring this possibility of recursion that could exceed the machine and Warren is also reminding us that there was no essential automaticity to the algorithm, it was only a decision that was taken and so I think we're all trying to play around with an alternative way of thinking about automation but that's, I think that would be the question is that But of course we could do a more humanistic programming bit. That's not what's at stake in many of the large scale.
Yeah, especially because ergonomics, of course, has got a massive history within trying to develop forms of adaptation of the human to the machine. And I think obviously what we have seen with cognitive ergonomics is the other way around it. It's the machine entering the body, entry cognition, entering the brain, there was the framework of computers, so the big framework, there was the users, sorry, the programmer that had only to look at the machine and be completely adapted to that framework machine. That's a form of ergonomics, this mechanic system. It really informed the development of computer, in terms of computer frame, computer media,
telephone exchange systems. There is something that changed with this kind of development, object-oriented programming and the kind of miniaturization of machines, the ergonomics became more and more absorbed the ecology of the body and we can transpire. We don't really need to pay attention to how we deal with this machine. The decision is completely intuitive. It's called naturalisation of that. It's a naturalisation so that you think that you're wasting a lot of time in
in terms of how much does it take for a human to resolve this problem okay but it's also because it's framed already according to a language that seems intuitive but actually you really need to break it down there's so many layers that we don't see and that's where the kind of time issue comes back because you know you you recurse in terms of you know because I find your question very interesting and I would like to respond to this when you describe when you said that you go to the anthropological world to observe what's happening at this moment you are an observer you are an observer of a system
so for you but for people they are within the system, they have different experience. You and the system that you decide are within another system. And that is not something you observe. So this is the question of the case 60. What I appreciate is that you have to think in this way. So that makes your question more complicated in that sense. But I try to think of everything related to the cursivity. It's true that I try to generalize, but I think that as a philosopher, to pose a philosophical question,
it's a bit allegarian that you ask what is the essence of agrofilms. because of course each agrofilm has a specific role, specific function for example. But here I have two points that I want to make about interaction and one in the journal called incoherability. My question is, what would be the productive thinking? If we start thinking from the limit of the machine, from the incompatibility,
I think this is also a trap. When Besson says that he can't think, start with science. He is no longer philosophizing. So philosophy starts not with science, but with science. So that's what I think would be more productive to think. Now, in relation to this question, is the question of... I want to further distinguish what you have said regarding machine, because for me, Turing machine is not a machine.
Turing machine is not a machine. What is Turing machine? Turing machine is a schema. Schematisation is not yet a machine. Tulli has never made a machine. He only has a schematisation and the realisation of such a machine. So we have thinking, we have thought, then we have schema and then we have machine. We have materialisation of such a schema as a machine. And then we enter into a kind of ecology of invention. And that is where the question of interaction has to be put back into this question of ecology of invention.
So if we think of this way, that what would be productive is to think this human-machine relation, what would be productive relation in between? And here I refer to the article that I think all of us have read, it's the article written by Kuglielm called organism and machine, machine organism. In which Kuglielm tried to propose what he called general organology and the Stigler's interpretation is different from Kuglielm. But Kuglielm's idea of general organology, he made a... So it's no longer to think of the mechanization of the mind, or in the way, as I can say,
to find the translation from the working language to machine language. No, that is still a Cartesian project. But one is to think of an organology in the way that it is creative. It is a creative evolution in the sense of vessels. And it is this moment that, from William says, that the first thinker of general organology is Bessel, is the creative evolution, in the way that we should think of how to deal with the machines to produce to become a creative process. Well, I was just going to say... I have a face, water. No, I got my mic.
So just to respond to Mark, so I have a chapter in this forthcoming book on work languages and machine languages. And I started with a reading of the beginning of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which is a discussion of the division of labor for making pins. Now where does he get that from? actually gets that from a reading of the 18th century French encyclopedia that was produced by and what they what they did they spent decades sending people either themselves or sending other people out to craftsman's workshops and doing what we think of as ethnographic work now sort of anthropological work how do they do the work and what kind of machines do they build to
to do the work. And they come up with a way of translating the artisans and the artists' language into literary language of the day. That's their work. And they do it in two ways. One is they come up with a language that's a language of, as the historian of design Antoine Picon says that really focuses on operations, processes, and gestures. So those are the lexical terms. But then they also come up with a whole visual language, because every artisan is given several blocks that are printed of what's the studio look like,
how do they make this, what are the machines, what are the parts of the machines, and so forth. And so, it's very informative to look at that because you can both trace that back, see where it comes from. It comes from a dream that Francis Bacon had and Leibniz shared and so forth of how to catalog how stuff is made, more or less. And they did it. And then you can move it forward, you can see people like Babbage, who builds the first computer, right? He's reading Adam Smith on the division of labor and saying, Oh, you know what?
Yeah, people can divide labor up, but so I can build a machine that divides labor up. So what we get is a kind of history of translating work language into machine language. And what that is, is, well, as you were saying, that, you could say it's a Cartesian project, but I don't think it's a Cartesian project. It's a project of automation. Ultimately, it's an attempt to automate people out and machines in, right? So it's creating labor for capital. It's very much at the center of capital. And there's also a colonial question. And colonial, for sure. Sorry, I did that at that time.
I agree with that capital. I think that's very important. Yeah. So I just want to say the politics of automation, which you talked about for a bit, I think it's very clear. The politics of the algorithm, which I think can go where you was talking about. Other forms of thinking, other forms of creative thinking. That is really still enigmatic in my mind. But the politics of automation is very clear. It's capitalism. Period. What you're saying is the politics of automation is not identical to the politics of the algorithm. No. Did Marius use that very pin example? Yes. Yes, I don't believe I did.
Pins run through. So it was Perronet, who was the first director of the Pont des Chaussées, which was, who did the graphic work, an engineer. We'll move forward. We're kind of in overtime, so we'll injury time. We can stick down. We can keep going, yes. Please. So, no, except that, you know, that's by calling the automation really transformed, you know, industrial automation and the mechanical automation, which of course Marx already envisioned into the automation of cognition. And that's where the algorithm comes back, because historically the transformation of reason into modes of rule behavior, you know, decision-making as automated into rule behavior forms as algorithms
is totally part of the Civil War and Cold War. You know, we have the history of that. and the history of cognitive science. And the history of cognitive science. So I think automation has really changed, we really need to hold onto that kind of transformation. And I would like to say, I agree with you that philosophy, the danger between philosophy and science is exactly what I'm interested in. I don't want to recapitulate philosophy as the master discipline vis-à-vis science, and I don't agree with the question that philosophy is about the creation of concept and science about function because what's happening in this kind of transformation automation into rule of behavior and decision making
the transformation of reason into rationality or into automated forms of decision making and algorithms really requires us to address the question of function. So the question of function in computability is not as something outside function, but as a capacity of function to register it could absorb the incomputable. So, you know, which could be the differential function, you know, in lab-in-its the lessons talked about it, but there are other modes of function that we should look at in terms of this contemporary system of decision making. So I agree with both. You're getting out.
Yes, it feels to me that also goes across all the discussions today today is also something that wasn't mentioned earlier maybe, so the figure of the political perhaps, and maybe that could relate to on the one hand this idea, especially what we are talking about now, perhaps this projective type of thinking that Mark wrote up, right, So design, modeling, yes, the vision of what can happen, right? So what, well, it is an interactive format as well, right? But within that, just purely clinical, let's say, interaction, right, between the two parties.
So there is still some room, I guess, for, yes, vision or, as I'd like to, well, that's why I'm phrased in terms of the funeral. So, and the other question then could be, so where is the space then for, or is there a space for pretension, for example, in the time of capitalism, if we already know that the logic of this automatic cooperation that we are all engaged in is clearly leading us towards for example, producing more work, yes, not the negative work, the positive work.
So, yeah, what could be still a vision there? Yeah, if you want to address the figure, I'll say. Thanks. Well, for me, I think the question of the political for me consists of the gesture about refusal. because I think, let's go back to the Ames that is this little boy, I don't know if you remember this boy the boy, what is the boy doing? the boy is, at that time it was called a fire machine it was not called a steam machine, but it was used to say there is a fire machine, and this boy has to operate
He was working with the fire machine and had to do something regularly with the machine. This boy, because the machine is moving, he linked this handle that he has to operate with the machine. So he automatised. I think that's true. So this point, what Adam Smith says, that what his boy can do, he said, then this boy can go and play with the pheloms. Now, of course, this is a... So I think there's an interesting moment that it is automation,
but it's not... But it opened up a possibility for this boy to go out and play with these pheloms. If they both come and say, no, I'm sorry, what are you doing there? You are playing, you are wasting your money. So they both have to prepare to work. And of course, this is what I think that the kind of fantasy of machines that with the kind of automation you will be able to replace surplus labor to free time. But what I'm trying to say here is that the whole, regarding the question of political,
and as I said before, anticipation, and so on and so forth, is that in what we are, can we refuse such a future? And when I say you feel such a future, of course we have to elaborate on the question of the future. It's not only my future of tomorrow, what I'm going to do next year, what kind of job I'm going to have, but also the future of technological development. And I think it is because when I post to David this kind of what I've called the double bite of the political regarding the development of artificial intelligence and the acceleration towards technological similarity.
And this seems to be presented as a future of humanity. And I think we have to refuse this. Simply for the reason of using Schmidt's says, whoever invokes humanity wants to lie. Whoever invokes humanity wants to lie, and that is a big lie that we are witnessing today, and we have to refuse this and to think what would be the technological futures that we have. And I think that this will be a key question if we want to think about geopolitics and the question of sovereignty. Because then the question will be how are we going to define sovereignty if it is not defined by the degree of automation.
Yes. Okay, I think that's a really good place to stop because we're a little over time and also I really like that. I really want to thank Warren and Luciana, especially you for coming all the way from Germany. We're really pleased to have you here. Thank you for putting us here. Thanks for coming everyone.