“This piece was developed while participating in Matteo Pasquinelli‘s seminar, Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic Governance, hosted by The New Centre for Research & Practice in March 2015… The status of robots and workers under cognitive capitalism can be likened to Searle’s Chinese Room, as noted by Srnicek and Williams when writing on high frequency automated trading. What was initiated by Searle as an argument emphasizing the alienness and stupidity of artificial intelligence, complete with Orientalist framing, is here repurposed to view the subject of the “workerobot” within the calculating machine’d political economy.”
“Dreams In the Silicon Chamber”
“Searle’s scenario emphasises the stupidity of the person in the room, who blindly follows a rule book in order to connect in a basic manner to the machine in the Turing Test and other AI beings.”
“I have inputs and outputs that are indistinguishable from those of the native Chinese speaker, and I can have any formal program you like, but I still understand nothing. For the same reasons, Schank’s computer understands nothing of any stories, whether in Chinese, English, or whatever.
–John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs” (1980).”
“The argument highlights useful distinctions between representational information processing and semantic understanding.”
“The human in the room is a blind follower of rules without understanding, and hence “stupid.””
“Deleuze describes stupidity as an inability to dissociate from presuppositions, or, in other words, unexamined doxa or representation.”
“In the Chinese room the presuppositions are bound in the form of a codex, which the human inside slavishly follows.”
“Room and rules are “[N]either the ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form,” using Deleuze’s description of stupidity (Difference and Representation, page 152; 1994).”
“He goes on to call it “a specifically human form of bestiality,” (ibid, page 150) which also suits Searle’s cage.”
“Srnicek and Williams recall Searle to point out that high frequency trading (HFT) systems, though much faster than humans, are simply very fast information processors, lacking semantic sophistication, or craftiness: they are not cunning automata.”
“I follow the common “systems” view that the room, rulebook, and person can together be said to think, as cognition is an attribute of the system as a whole, but not the rule-following human within it.”
“The human in the room-system acts like the CPU of a computer, only executing instructions on a very limited pipeline of localized input data, the sentence for translation, but not holding the overall program or system state [see Rey, Georges (1986). What’s really going on in Searle’s ‘chinese room’. Philosophical Studies 50 (September):169-85].”
“The room-system can still think in the same way the computer-system can still compute, despite the limited scope of its parts.”
“The stupidity of the isolated, confused, rule-following human inside the mechanical room contrasts with Gilbert Simondon’s description of a technical mentality as, “a mode of knowledge sui generis that essentially uses the analogical transfer and the paradigm, and founds itself on the discovery of common modes of functioning or of regime of operation in otherwise different orders of reality that are chosen just as well from the living or the inert as from the human or the nonhuman.” [Simondon, Gilbert, ‘Technical Mentality’, translated by De Boever, Arne, Parrhesia Number 7, 2009].”
“His view is Orientalist in the sense of Edward W. Said, framing one of its parts as inherently disconnected or “other.” The elements of the system associated with Chinese are all mechanical or formal symbolic processors, the Chinese characters input and output, the formally stated rules, and the (implied) system for associating rules with inputs and outputs.”
“The economy itself, as noted by Friedrich A. Hayek, is a calculator of great power, and a “civilized capitalist machine” to Deleuze and Guattari.”
“There are then two visions of the isolated worker within cognitive capitalism: the Mechanical Turk, where sophisticated semantic reasoning by a human is hidden in a claustrophobic cupboard behind a facade of gadgetry, and the Chinese Room, where formal rules of unknown meaning are followed blindly in a sealed office.”
“Rat Cunning”
“HFT systems are fast executors of formal rules, but as Srnicek and Williams note, they lack the cunning, the metis of a sailor or a hunter [for use of this concept see Escape Velocities (Alex Williams, e-flux journal), Mohammad Salemy’s interview with Srnicek and Williams, and Benedict Singleton’s (Notes Towards) Speculative Design].”
“These systems are tools – sometimes traps - crafted by humans.”
“Even in more sophisticated future forms, such systems are limited by the boundaries of computational reason as described by Giuseppe Longo. In an analysis reminiscent of the early Wittgenstein, Longo describes how getting data from analog sources into a computer imposes a digital mesh that limits the fidelity of the representation to the underlying physical phenomena.”
“This suggests a reason for Chinese rooms to exist in a computationally dominated economy: to observe phenomena of human cognition.”
“There still seems to be a cognitive gap in creation of the model, the recognition of a good input, and its conversion into a digital signal (let alone the materiality and craft required in agriculture). Modeling and craft appears to be a more inherently cognitive activity, because it is more than raw correlation: we still need semantics.”
“The anticipated emergence of cunning automata, as Srnicek and Williams term them, may not require a rewrite from scratch, starting from remaking computational fundamentals on less digital lines (quantum computers, complexity theory, etc). Digital and analog parts form systems that exceed their own limits.”
“This is more or less a cybernetic view, but the cybernetic mechanisms of feedback and digital / biological similarity aren’t the focus of this discussion.”
“If automata lack cunning, it is perhaps because current interfaces to analog sources of cunning are too indirect.”
“They are too abstract, in the sense of Simondon’s abstract machines [see Simondon, Gilbert, ‘Du mode d’existence des objets techniques’, Paris, Aubier, Editions: Montaigne: 1958. Translation: Mellamphy, N, ‘On The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects‘, University of Western Ontario, 1980.].”
“Our computing systems’ naïveté may be an artifact of their immaturity – their antisocial relationship with humans and an analog world – rather than a fundamental limit.”
“In the evolution of these technical objects, and their operators’ culture, they can concretise to form cunning systems. It becomes an interesting engineering detail that some of their internals are digital.”
“Searle’s Chinese Room describes the absurdity and alienation of work life when technical mentality is absent.”
“When one puts railroad tracks over hundreds of kilometers, when one rolls off a cable from city to city and sometimes from continent to continent, it is the industrial modality that takes leave from the industrial center in order to extend itself through nature. It is not a question here of the rape of nature or of the victory of the Human Being over the elements, because in fact it is the natural structures themselves that serve as the attachment point for the network that is being developed: the relay points of the Hertzian “cables” for example rejoin with the high sites of ancient sacredness above the valleys and the seas. Here, the technical mentality successfully completes itself and rejoins nature by turning itself into a thought network, into the material and conceptual synthesis of particularity and concentration, individuality and collectivity because the entire force of the network is available in each one of its points, and its mazes are woven together with those of the world, in the concrete and the particular.
–Gilbert Simondon, “Technical Mentality” (1980).”
“Simondon describes the well made technical object as intermeshing different milieus in a coherent and mutually supporting way.”
“The creators of such objects must have a technical mentality that lets them interpret both milieus, and construct objects that interface between them.”
“When a human operator has a technical mentality, they can learn from the platform and have the tools to improve it.”
“The worker can then become a designer with the means to extend a technical system and an operator using the system; both individual component and director of the technical ensemble, whom is able to work in the room and open the door.”