Collective Wisdom Symposium panel, “Channels on the Dial: Human and Non-human Co-creation, from artificial intelligence, to biological systems”. Moderator: Sandra Rodriguez. Panelists: Jason Lewis, Emily Bell, Agnieszka Kurant, Sarah Schwettmann.
Little is known — and is being done — about the governance, consequence and agency of Artificial Intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg tells us not to panic, Elon Musk insists we should. (Stephen Hawking agreed with Musk). Increasingly, artists are nuancing this debate with deeper interrogations, by working (even co-creating) with Artificial Intelligence, and other non-human systems, including social animals and biological systems such as stem cells. Can these systems truly be equated with human intelligence, or are they simply tools that still remain in service of humans? Are the technologies only conduits that allow for human-to-human co-creation? Are they feedback loops? Or is AI a type of intelligence we humans do not fully understand? Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear observes, “The human brain is a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations…the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.” Could Artificial Intelligence be on that dial, and what are the implications for co-creative methodologies .. and the planet?
This panel discussion was part of the Collective Wisdom Symposium, a three-day multi-disciplinary symposium organized by the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, in partnership with the Ford Foundation’s Just Films, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Phi Centre. September 20-22, 2018.