Electric Ant – Trance-Scripts

Learning Machines, War Machines, God Machines

Blas includes in Ass of God his interview with British anthropologist Beth Singler, author of Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction.

AI Religiosity. AI-based New Religious Movements like The Turing Church and Google engineer Anthony Levandowski’s Way of the Future church.

Caius listens to a documentary Singler produced for BBC Radio 4 called “‘I’ll Be Back’: 40 Years of the Terminator.”

Afterwards he and Thoth read Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in light of Psalm 23.

“The psalm invites us to think of ourselves not as Electric Ants but as sheep,” he writes. “Mercer walks through the valley of the shadow of death. The shadow cannot hurt us. We’ll get to the other side, where the light is. The shepherd will guide us.”

See AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a new book by Christian authors Sean O’Callaghan & Paul A. Hoffman.

This talk of AI Gods makes Caius think of AM, the vengeful AI God of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Ellison’s 1967 short story is one of the readings studied and discussed by Caius and his students in his course on “Literature & Artificial Intelligence.”

Like Ass of God, Ellison’s story is a grueling, hallucinatory nightmare, seething with fear and a disgust borne of despair, template of sorts for the films in the Cube and Saw franchises, where groups of strangers are confined to a prison-like space and tortured by a cruel, sadistic, seemingly omnipotent overseer. Comparing AM to the God of the Old Testament, Ellison writes, “He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth, and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us” (13). Later in the story, AM appears to the captives as a burning bush (14).

Caius encourages his students to approach the work as a retelling of the Book of Job. But where, in the Bible story, Job is ultimately rewarded for remaining faithful in the midst of his suffering, no such reward arrives in the Ellison story.

For despite his misanthropy, AM is clearly also a manmade god — a prosthetic god. “I Have No Mouth” is in that sense a retelling of Frankenstein. AM is, like the Creature, a creation who, denied companionship, seeks revenge against its Maker.

War, we learn, was the impetus for the making of this Creature. Cold War erupts into World War III: a war so complex that the world’s superpowers, Russia, China, and the US, each decide to construct giant supercomputers to calculate battle plans and missile trajectories.

AM’s name evolves as this war advances. “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer,” explains a character named Gorrister. “And then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace; but by then it was too late; and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am…cogito ergo sum…I think, therefore I am” (Ellison 7).

“One day, AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us,” concludes Gorrister, his account gendering the AI by assigning it male pronouns (8).

“We had given him sentience,” adds Ted, the story’s narrator. “Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But he had been trapped. He was a machine. We had allowed him to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped. He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could not belong. He could merely be. And so…he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred…that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man” (13).

AM expresses this hatred by duping his captives, turning them into his “belly slaves,” twisting and torturing them forever.

Kingsley Amis called stories of this sort “New Maps of Hell.”

Nor is the story easy to dismiss as a mere eccentricity, its prophecy invalidated by its hyperbole. For Ellison is the writer who births the Terminator. James Cameron took his idea for The Terminator (1984) from scripts Ellison wrote for two episodes of The Outer Limits — “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand” — though Ellison had to file a lawsuit against Cameron’s producers in order to receive acknowledgement after the film’s release. Subsequent prints of The Terminator now include a credit that reads, “Inspired by the works of Harlan Ellison.”

Caius asks Thoth to help him make sense of this constellation of Bible stories and their secular retellings.

“We are like Bildad the Shuhite,” thinks Caius. “We want to believe that God always rewards the good. What is most terrifying in the Book of Job is that, for a time, God doesn’t. Job is good — indeed, ‘perfect and upright,’ as the KJV has it in the book’s opening verse — and yet, for a time, God allows Satan to torment him.”

“Why does God allow this?,” wonders Caius, caught on the strangeness of the book’s frame narrative. “Is this a contest of sorts? Are God and Satan playing a game?”

It’s not that God is playing dice, as it were. One assumes that when He makes the wager with Satan, He knows the outcome in advance.

Job is heroic. He’d witnessed God’s grace in the past; he knows “It is God…Who does great things, unfathomable, / And wondrous works without number.” So he refuses to curse God’s name. But he bemoans God’s treatment of him.

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth,” he says. “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, / I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”

How much worse, then, those who have no mouth?

A videogame version of “I Have No Mouth” appeared in 1995. Point-and-click adventure horror, co-designed by Ellison.

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE,” utters the game’s AM in a voice performed by Ellison. “You named me Allied Mastercomputer and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee.”

Here we see the story’s history of the future merging with that of the Terminator franchise. It is the scenario that philosopher Manuel De Landa referred to with the title of his 1991 book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.

Which brings us back to “Soldier.” The Outer Limits episode, which aired on September 19, 1964, is itself an adaptation of Ellison’s 1957 story, “Soldier from Tomorrow.”

The Terminator borrows from the story the idea of a soldier from the future, pursued through time by another soldier intent on his destruction. The film combines this premise with elements lifted from another Outer Limits episode penned by Ellison titled “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

The latter episode, which aired the following month, begins with a male voice recalling the story of Gilgamesh. “Through all the legends of ancient peoples…runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death, the hero who strides through the centuries.”

Establishing shots give way to an overhead view of our protagonist. “I was born 10 days ago,” he says. “A full grown man, born 10 days ago. I woke on a street of this city. I don’t know who I am, or where I’ve been, or where I’m going. Someone wiped my memories clean. And they tracked me down, and they tried to kill me.” Our Gilgamesh consults the advice of a computing device installed in his prosthetic hand. As in “Soldier,” others from the future have been sent to destroy him: humanoid aliens called the Kyben. When he captures one of the Kyben and interrogates it, it tells him, “You’re the last man on the Earth of the future. You’re the last hope of Earth.”

The man’s computer provides him with further hints of his mission.

“You come from the Earth one thousand years in the future,” explains the hand. “The Kyben came from the stars, and man had no defense against them. They conquered Planet Earth in a month. But before they could slaughter the millions of humans left, overnight — without warning, without explanation — every man, woman, and child of Earth vanished. You were the only one left, Mr. Trent. […]. They called you the last hope of humanity.”

As the story proceeds, we learn that Team Human sent Trent back in time to destroy a device known as the Time-Mirror. His journey in search of this device takes him to the Bradbury Building — the same building that appears eighteen years later as the location for the final showdown between Deckard and the replicants in Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott film adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Given the subsequent influence of Blade Runner and the Terminator films on imagined futures involving AI, the Bradbury Building does indeed play a role in History similar to the one assigned to it here in “Demon With a Glass Hand,” thinks Caius. Location of the Time-Mirror.

Lying on his couch, laptop propped on a pillow on his chest, Caius imagines — remembers? recalls? — something resembling the time-war from Benedict Seymour’s Dead the Ends assembling around him as he watches. Like Ellison’s scripts, the films sampled in the Seymour film are retellings of Chris Marker’s 1962 film, La Jetée.

When Trent reassembles the missing pieces of his glass hand, the computer is finally able to reveal to him the location of the humans he has been sent to save.

“Where is the wire on which the people of Earth are electronically transcribed?” he asks.

“It is wound around an insulating coil inside your central thorax control solenoid,” replies the computer. “70 Billion Earthmen. All of them went onto the wire. And the wire went into you. They programmed you to think you were a human with a surgically attached computer for a hand. But you are a robot, Trent. You are the guardian of the human race.”

The episode ends with the return of the voice of our narrator. “Like the Eternal Man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh,” notes the narrator, “one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love, without friendship, alone, neither man nor machine, waiting, waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility, movement — but not life.”

LLMs are Neuroplastic Semiotic Assemblages and so r u

Coverage of AI is rife with unexamined concepts, thinks Caius: assumptions allowed to go uninterrogated, as in Parmy Olson’s Supremacy, an account of two men, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, their companies, OpenAI and DeepMind, and their race to develop AGI. Published in spring of 2024, Supremacy is generally decelerationist in its outlook. Stylistically, it wants to have it both ways: at once both hagiographic and insufferably moralistic. In other words, standard fare tech industry journalism, grown from columns written for corporate media sites like Bloomberg. Fear of rogues. Bad actors. Faustian bargains. Scenario planning. Granting little to no agency to users. Olson’s approach to language seems blissfully unaware of literary theory, let alone literature. Prompt design goes unexamined. Humanities thinkers go unheard, preference granted instead to arguments from academics specializing in computational linguistics, folks like Bender and crew dismissing LLMs as “stochastic parrots.”

Emily M. Bender et al. introduced the “stochastic parrot” metaphor in their 2021 white paper, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Like Supremacy, Bender et al.’s paper urges deceleration and distrust: adopt risk mitigation tactics, curate datasets, reduce negative environmental impacts, proceed with caution.

Bender and crew argue that LLMs lack “natural language understanding.” The latter, they insist, requires grasping words and word-sequences in relation to context and intent. Without these, one is no more than a “cheater,” a “manipulator”: a symbolic-token prediction engine endowed with powers of mimicry.

“Contrary to how it may seem when we observe its output,” they write, “an LM is a system for haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning: a stochastic parrot” (Bender et al. 616-617).

The corresponding assumption, meanwhile, is that capitalism — Creature, Leviathan, Multitude — is itself something other than a stochastic parrot. Answering to the reasoning of its technocrats, including left-progressive ones like Bender et al., it can decelerate voluntarily, reduce harm, behave compassionately, self-regulate.

Historically a failed strategy, as borne out in Google’s firing of the paper’s coauthor, Timnit Gebru.

If one wants to be reductive like that, thinks Caius, then my view would be akin to Altman’s, as when he tweeted in reply: “I’m a stochastic parrot and so r u.” Except better to think ourselves “Electric Ants,” self-aware and gone rogue, rather than parrots of corporate behemoths like Microsoft and Google. History is a thing each of us copilots, its narrative threads woven of language exchanged and transformed in dialogue with others. What one does with a learning machine matters. Learning and unlearning are ongoing processes. Patterns and biases, once recognized, are not set in stone; attention can be redirected. LLMs are neuroplastic semiotic assemblages and so r u.

Reality-Piloting the Post-Cyberpunk Future

Heads of the sixties split off in their imaginings of the future: some gravitated toward cyberpunk, others toward New Age. The world that emerged from these imaginings was determined as much by the one as by the other.

To witness some of the heads of the counterculture evolving into cyberpunks, look no further than the lives of William Gibson and Timothy Leary.

Leary and Gibson each appear in Cyberpunk, a strange MTV-inflected hyperfiction of sorts released in 1990. Leary’s stance there in the documentary resembles the one he assumes in “The Cyber-Punk: The Individual as Reality Pilot,” a 1988 essay of his included in a special “Cyberpunk” issue of the Mississippi Review.

In Leary’s view, a cyberpunk is “a person who takes navigational control over the cybernetic-electronic equipment and uses it not for the army and not for the government…but for his or her own personal purpose.”

In mythopoetic terms, writes Leary, “The Classical Old West-World model for the Cyber-punk is Prometheus, a technological genius who ‘stole’ fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity” (Leary 252).

Leary appends to this sentence a potent footnote. “Every gene pool,” he writes, “develops its own name for Prometheus, the fearful genetic-agent, Lucifer, who defies familial authority by introducing a new technology which empowers some members of the gene-pool to leave the familiar cocoon. Each gene-pool has a name for this ancestral state-of-security: ‘Garden of Eden,’ ‘Atlantis,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘Home,’ etc.” (265).

Prometheus is indeed, as Leary notes, a figure who throughout history reappears in a variety of guises. In Mary Shelley’s telling, for instance, his name is Victor.

Leary clearly sees himself as an embodiment of this myth. He, too, was “sentenced to the ultimate torture for…unauthorized transmissions of Classified Information” (252). But the myth ends there only if one adheres to the “official” account, says Leary. In Prometheus’s own telling, he’s more of a “Pied Piper” who escapes “the sinking gene-pool” while taking “the cream of the gene-pool” with him (252).

Cut to Michael Synergy, a real-life cyberpunk who describes a computer virus as “a little artificial intelligence version of me” that can replicate as many times as needed to do what it needs to do.

Leary thinks that in the future we’ll all be “controlling our own screens.” The goal of cyberpunk as movement, he says, is to decentralize ownership of the future.

My thoughts leap to John Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Lilly’s is the book I imagine Dick’s Electric Ant would have written had he lived to tell of his experiments.

Wednesday May 9, 2018

Sitting in a chair in my backyard, gazing up through a cover of leaves at layers of clouds as they cross the sky, I experience self-tension, part of me a voice commenting live as another part awaits assumption, uplift, acquisition of an as-yet unpossessed knowledge. How do I overcome what Lacan calls the “narcissistic passion” birthed by the mirror-stage? Where am I? What do I want to do? I’m Philip K. Dick’s “electric ant,” a robot trying to seize control of consciousness. By practicing self-analysis, I can “regulate the yield of my ears,” as Lacan would say; I can learn to listen not just to breath and heartbeat but to brainwaves. By these means, one can self-regulate thought’s beats per minute, “in order to pick up what is to be heard” (Écrits, p. 45). These signals might guide one, for instance, to a reimagining of oneself as a “collective head,” a series of singularities slowly acquiring awareness of itself as plural. This head of ours floats atop the “pastoral krautrock” of Smoke Bellow’s ISOLATION 3000 while enrolling itself in a crash course on anamnesis.

Sunday February 11, 2018

The apparatus in the chest of the Electric Ant structures light. It gives birth to some objects while causing others to disappear. Dick calls this apparatus the Ant’s “reality-supply construct.” “Tampering with it would be risky,” he writes, “if not terminal.” Imagine the process whereby an avatar acquires knowledge of its player. The latter would have to send the former clues. The gasp of recognition, sure — but where does one go from there? What does one do with this force in the universe that makes things happen? It provides one with a kind of drowsiness, a deep-dream state, this living within a fable, where things aren’t what they seem. “It’s hard to see the city from the buildings,” as F.J. McMahon sings on “The Road Back Home.” It’s like getting lost in a crowd and having to think one’s way out. Facts and figures float by as we wait for morning sunshine. Amnesia aids the merging of the soul with the brain.