Micheal Ziegler

Topic

Vectors of Artificial Intelligence Ethics, Social Hope and Politics of Destiny

Department of Political Science

Date & location

• Monday, April 15, 2024

• 10:00 A.M.

• Clearihue Building, Room B007

• And Virtual

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Simon Glezos, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

• Dr. Arthur Kroker, Department of Political Science, UVic (Member)

• Dr. Jentery Sayers, Department of English, UVic (Outside Member) 

External Examiner

• Dr. Richardo Dominguez, Department of Visual Arts, UC San Diego 

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Martin Adam, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, UVic

   

Abstract

I explore the idea that AI embeds itself in and (re)orders every aspect of human life by asking the question: What is the reality and the socio-political consequences of AI research and implementation? The dissertation is split into two main parts.

In part one, I interrogate AI discourses and trajectories to understand the magnitude of AI research and development. I begin with a cognitive AI research orientation as a means of positioning the methodological problems troubling AI research, innovation and implementation with a primary focus on the ethical limitations of AI creations. I follow cognitive AI methodology with computer scientist Ray Kurzweil’s critique of cognitive AI through his revelation of a neurological reality: a mind-based intelligence always already artificial in virtual simulation—brains simulate the mind. Finally, physicist and AI researcher Max Tegmark’s physics-based AI approach reveals the hopes and fears—ethical, social and political—associated with AI implementation as we move into the future—why the future is bright and exciting yet equally dark and dangerous.

In part two, I focus on questions unanswered by the vectored discourses in part one—an unrealized nonhuman metaphysics. First, we are pressed with the (de)positionality of humanity. Here, I place physicists turned social philosophers Karen Barad and Klaus Mainzer in exegetical discourse in order to understand nonhuman (yet fundamentally realist) orientations in a quantum entangled universe. Doing so allows us to reposition human intelligence and anthropic wills toward knowledge as we move to understand the being of homo sapiens in an artificially intelligent Universe. Next, I turn our attention toward a history of intelligent orientations to break through the scientific obsession with advancement by asking how the orders of intelligence and artificiality have been patterned in the history of thought from the beginning of Western philosophy by focusing on the presokratics. Finally, I turn towards Indigenous science and knowledge creation (emphasizing myth) concerning quantum physics as a means of critiquing Western scientific understandings of intelligence. This turn towards Indigenous science expands on human hopes and fears of AI by interrogating the limitations of viewing AI problematics as future issues and instead seeing how future fears of dystopian orders exist today. By seeing dystopian realities today, we are better positioned to overcome both present and future failures of AI implementation in society.