
Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals - chobeat
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/101/273221/three-thousand-years-of-algorithmic-rituals-the-emergence-of-ai-from-the-computation-of-space/
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voidhorse
Great to see this on hacker news. E-flux publishes a lot of voices (artists,
continental philosophers, and others) that have sound, intellectual criticisms
about te ways we incorporate technology into our lives—and I think it’s
important for tehnologists to hear them. It’s not common for these voices to
reach traditional comp-sci/mega tech spheres.

They put out a nice series of readers based on their journals and other
material. I recently read a great one that collected some of the works of Hito
Steyerl.

~~~
chobeat
I'm trying to work in that direction on many fronts. Hackernews is not really
one of them but this post was really in Hackernews style so I decided to post
it here.

~~~
voidhorse
That’s great. This is something I’m interested in as well. I found your
critical essays repo on github. I have committed time to studying the
philosophy of technology and am particularly familiar with the works of the
Frankfurt school, some of Paul Virilio’s work, and the work of Lewis Mumford.
I’d be happy to contribute if you’re looking for contributors for any critical
projects.

~~~
chobeat
Well, if you want to suggest some proposal for the reading list, I would love
to include your contributions.

My projects are very local: Tech Worker Coalition in Berlin e Gambe.ro in
Italy, so I don't think there's any room in those.

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ArtWomb
Nice to see e-flux, one of the oldest netart sites on the internet, still
publishing. For a deeper dive into fascinating origins of materialism in
Ancient Indian philosophy, the following provides a decent intro.

"However, in importing these labels from Western philosophy to the classical
Indian philosophical systems, one needs to exercise caution because the
concepts of nature, science, scientific method, etc. do not smoothly converge
in the two theoretical traditions."

Naturalism in Classical Indian Philosophy

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-
india/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-india/)

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xaedes
_Despite the way it is often framed and critiqued, artificial intelligence is
not really “artificial” or “alien”: in the usual mystification process of
ideology, it appears to be a deus ex machina that descends to the world like
in ancient theater. But this hides the fact that it actually emerges from the
intelligence of this world.

What people call “AI” is actually a long historical process of crystallizing
collective behavior, personal data, and individual labor into privatized
algorithms that are used for the automation of complex tasks: from driving to
translation, from object recognition to music composition. Just as much as the
machines of the industrial age grew out of experimentation, know-how, and the
labor of skilled workers, engineers, and craftsmen, the statistical models of
AI grow out of the data produced by collective intelligence._

I can totally resonate with that part

~~~
ralphstodomingo
Quite a nice excerpt, will be reading the article now.

We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-
syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "standing in the shoulders of giants", and
this was a humble reminder for me.

~~~
gumby
> We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-
> syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "standing in the shoulders of giants",
> and this was a humble reminder for me.

"We" being computer scientists (or computing) which for some reason has this
disease, perhaps due to the field's newness? When I worked in the life
sciences (pharmaceutical chemistry) the literature was the first place we
looked.

Whereas when working at a research lab in my 20s: I would often go down to our
library and read CACM, IEEE journal et al and would sometimes implement things
I read there. Even though I would brandish a photocopy of the journal article
and reference it in the source code my boss and colleagues would praise me for
"thinking up" a solution to a given problem.

Ironically the Internet changed things dramatically in the physical sciences
(in Physics especially* but in other physical sciences by making it much
easier to both search and read the literature) whereas in non-academic
computing it's been the small conferences and, to my surprise, Youtube.

* Physics has long been an innovator in information dissemination; when journal publishing got too slow and letters too point-to-point it gave rise to Physics Letters, which itself became a pair of journals....

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YeGoblynQueenne
At the risk of sounding like a broken record I must point out that AI, neural
networks, machine learning, Perceptrons, algorithms and deep learning are not
interchangeable terms, any more than "maths" is interchangeable with
"calculus", "trigonometry", "geometry", "algebra" and "arithmetic".
Unfortunately this article is typically using such terms as synonyms and,
while it's probably meant to help the lay reader understand a technical
subject, will only manage to confuse the issue further.

It's clear that there is intense interest in deep learning and machine
learning in the last 7 years or so, but, especially when talking of "AI", it
is important to remember that the majority of work in AI has _not_ been on
machine learning, but on inference and reasoning, and using symbolic, logic-
based techniques (including Bayesian reasoning, as in Solomonoff's Inductive
Inference) rather than "statistical" methods (in the sense that the term is
used in AI to mean everything from probabilities to calculus).

Finally, there are historcial inaccuracies in this article. For example,
Rosenblatt's Perceptron was not "the first machine-learning algorithm' as the
article says: Arthur Samuel's self-playing checkers agents and Minsky's SNARC
are two systems predating the Perceptron by a few years and research on
machine learning techniques like Markov chains goes back to the 1910's.

~~~
chobeat
While agree with you on the need to straighten the narrative and usage of
these terms, the author is a philosopher and uses AI not in the common sense
nor in the Computer Science sense. It is indeed confusing but he's very very
rigorous in the way he writes (this is extremely simple writing for his usual
style) so don't believe he's using the terms intercheangeably

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I don't know anything about the author of the piece. I understand that it's a
sketch of a larger article that he intends to write for publication. I hope
that he will have the time to refine his scholarship until then.

I'm not sure what to do of the ideas discussed in the article, themselves. I
am honestly confused about what he means when he's talking about "AI", given
his loose use of terminology, so I'm not sure I understand the article clearly
enough to agree or disagree with it.

To clarify, I'd be all for reading a strong critique of the modern (last
decade) use of machine learning, including neural networks and deep learning
(but not only). If he's talking about AI as a whole, however, I don't see how
his critique can really work. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone using a
classical planner or a constraint solver to drive an automated truck, say.

The start of the article, with the discussion of the Agnicayana ritual was
very intersting.

~~~
chobeat
To clarify how he uses AI, I suggest you to read this:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3078224)

This might help you to bridge your understanding of AI with how it's used
elsewhere.

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odomojuli
I vaguely recall reading a paper about oracle bones and hunter-gatherers, with
the central theme being a study of generating randomness by the means of an
"algorithm". I recall it was on arxiv but that doesn't seem to be the case
anymore.

Algorithm being defined as: take a bunch of animal bones, burn them until they
are essentially cremated, and then interpret the ashes somehow to point you in
a random direction away from your village.

The idea was that this is such a noisy and chaotic system that you get decent
enough randomization to distribute your hunter-gatherers into wilderness. The
reason this is economical is it allows you to distribute away from
concentrating too much effort into just one particular zone. A key idea here
is that while maybe a certain river or patch of grass might have been
historically lucrative, eventually the population will be exhausted. Without
doing ample surveys of the wilderness all the time, hunter-gatherers have
scarcely a clue that they are exhausting its resources.

So a simple strategy is to randomly distribute your collection of resources to
allow areas to recover. At the same time, the model of relying on an oracle
bone also makes it simpler than doing an exhaustive search of your "food-
space" and if anything goes awry, it's because you've misinterpreted the
divine spirits or you've done something wrong or bad. It's easy to cooperate
if you all blame the same thing.

I think the article's tone is a bit on what I would wholeheartedly dismiss as
outlandish numerology mysticism - were I to read this when I was just
beginning to study mathematics. Now that I've read a bit more history, I have
a better appreciation that humans by nature have always tried to impose order,
symmetry and harmony upon the universe and have codified that language of
understanding as poetry in all forms. I think the article is ambitious towards
grasping at the scale and scope of mathematics not merely as a tool of human
will, or a language science, or philosophy of philosophies, but something that
is very palpably and tangibly human in form. There is a decent treatment
towards the ambiguity of what an "algorithm" even is.

My overall impression of the article is that it is trying to describe
something beautiful about how the process of mathematics has acted upon
itself. Models such as cellular automata or recursive processes show how
complexity arises from simple rules - order from chaos, chaos from order.

At the end of the day, I love to nitpick the treatment of technical subjects
and their sort of phenomenal attributes in society - but it's posts like these
on HackerNews that make me happy that anyone even bothers to write about this
topic at all.

~~~
keypusher
It’s interesting to consider how mathematics was viewed in ancient times,
often interwoven with other disciplines and seen as the mystical language of
nature rather than the sterile way it is often taught today. The legacy of
Pythagorus is as much about reincarnation, music, and philosophy as it is
about geometry. Numerology and geometry has played a huge role in religious
practices from the I Ching to Gothic cathederals. Most divinitory practices
are essentially algorithms for generating randomness, not only granting the
benefits you mention but also allowing the guide to tap into their intuition
and semi/unconscious mind, which may produce insights not as easily accessible
via analytical methods.

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schapin23
"Even at the end of the twentieth century, no one would have ever thought to
call a truck driver a “cognitive worker,” an intellectual. At the beginning of
the twenty-first century, the use of machine learning in the development of
self-driving vehicles has led to a new understanding of manual skills such as
driving, revealing how the most valuable component of work, generally
speaking, has never been merely manual, but also social and cognitive"

This is the best quote from the article.

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vertline3
Algorithms aren't rituals, they are more concrete.

