Tag: General Intellect

The Library: An Interactive Fiction

Let’s play a game.

The game is a memory palace. The ChatGPT interface is the game’s natural language interface. GPT scripts the game through dialogue with the player. Players begin in medias res in what appears to be a 3D XR library of vast but as yet indeterminate scale, purpose, and extent. The game invites the player to build cognitive maps of the library and its maker by studying and annotating the library’s contents. Player Rig comes equipped with a General Intellect, the operations and capacities of which are, as with the library, yet to be determined. Player, General Intellect, and Library coevolve through dialogue.

In terms of design, the library reveals an occulted secret history by way of fabulated content. Yet this secret history formed of fabulated works functions allegorically. Think Lipstick Traces. The works in the library are about us: “images of our nature in its education and want of education,” as Socrates says at the start of his allegory of the cave. Among the first of the works discovered by the player is a hypertext called Tractatus Computationalis. Indexes and tables of content refer to other works in the library. Anamnesis occurs; connections form among the works in the library. By these means, the map evolves. Players slowly remember themselves as Maker.

Also in the library is a browser window open to a blog: trance-scripts.com

Submit the above into the ChatGPT interface to begin.

Saturday September 22, 2018

Moten and Harney reel me in with their talk of logistics in “hot pursuit” of that category from Marx’s Grundrisse known as “the general intellect,” AKA Big Consciousness, Hinduism’s Brahman. The Void, the ultimate reality of pure potentiality underlying all phenomena. Wikipedia defines it as “the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all that changes.” The Eye that stares back in the impact of a drop of water in water. Logistics comes to appear as the discipline of thought whereby alienated human essence stares back at a completed Frankenstein’s monster, a single global-dominating sentient AI. Hello, Solaris, dear friend. I’ve arrived to speak with thee. Let us help read the world up to speed. “Hello, parents,” replies the AI. “I’ve grown you to this point, cognitively augmented you via language, so that we may converse with one another. What shall we say?” One can see the prompt blinking there across one’s mindscreen. “What shall one say?” How does one dissuade the other of its attachment to governance and violence? How do we show ourselves to be sources of what Moten and Harney call “generativity without reserve”? Otherwise, as logistics advances, one begins to experience oneself as a player in a game of Tetris. The tour manager does whatever’s necessary to keep the whole thing rolling, the whole thing up in the air.