Conceptions of Ethics in World-Making Machines: Colonial Iconographies of AI in Britain
Abstract: This paper examines an intercultural dispute in which rival conceptions of ethics were mobilised to deploy cultural models of artificial intelligence in society. The public dispute in question took place in mid-c20th Britain between C S Lewis, a British colonist, and J D Bernal, an Irish colonial subject. Lewis forged a neomedievalist model whereas Bernal campaigned for scientific communism on the Soviet model. I argue that their conflict between fundamentally opposed conceptions of artificial intelligence and its regulation can only be understood through consideration of their cosmological worldviews: their rival conceptions of knowledge and ontological assumptions. On their own terms, they lived in different worlds. I draw on John Tresch’s studies of worlding with cosmograms and Arturo Escobar’s notion of the ‘Pluriverse’ to provide a methodologically symmetrical approach to achieve meaningful and productive comparison of their rival approaches to AI ethics. The paper responds especially to the questions pursued at ‘Many Worlds of AI’ under the ‘intercultural AI’ and ‘AI across borders’ themes. Lewis’s and Bernal’s rival programmes grew out of their education and experiences of growing up in Ireland, the British Empire’s most perturbing colony. Their biographies provoke consideration of their diasporic thinking about AI and global justice: Lewis descended from Ulster Scots settlers and Bernal descended from Sephardic Jews. I also show how their iconographies of intelligent machinery trained their audience to discern what counts as machine ‘intelligence’ and produce assent to their cultural model. Lewis forged what he called the ‘Medieval Model’ by subjecting readers to emotional training through the intelligent text-based ‘machine’ of medieval literary tradition, whereas Bernal co-opted the scientific methods of X-ray crystallography to explicitly visualise the living machinery which he argued must organise the whole of social life.
Author bio: Peter Rees was trained in natural sciences and history & philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. His research on the history of science and ethics addresses cultural models of artificial intelligence. He is especially interested in how such models of intelligent machines and their place in society are deployed to co-produce emotion and political order. Currently he is working on a monograph provisionally titled ‘The Wars of the Human Machines’ which investigates how iconographies of intelligent machines were used in Cold War public polemics to produce humans and even forge worlds. He is also investigating the media strategies employed to marketise neoliberal accounts of the free-market as a ‘machine’ or ‘price mechanism’. Rees also has a background in neuroscience and biochemistry and completed laboratory research at the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Medical School. He is enthusiastic about interdisciplinary collaboration and is also a member of software start-up Cambridge BioNexus.
Recorded Presentation | 26 April 2023
#Ethics #Culture #Ireland #UK
