Essay by Benjamin Bratton: “Alignment” toward “human-centered AI” are just words representing our hopes and fears related to how AI feels like it is out of control — but also to the idea that complex technologies were never under human control to begin with. For reasons more political than perceptive, some insist that “AI” is not even “real,” that it is just math or just an ideological construction of capitalism turning itself into a naturalized fact. Some critics are clearly very angry at the all-too-real prospects of pervasive machine intelligence. Others recognize the reality of AI but are convinced it is something that can be controlled by legislative sessions, policy papers and community workshops. This does not ameliorate the depression felt by still others, who foresee existential catastrophe.
All these reactions may confuse those who see the evolution of machine intelligence, and the artificialization of intelligence itself, as an overdetermined consequence of deeper developments. What to make of these responses?
Sigmund Freud used the term “Copernican” to describe modern decenterings of the human from a place of intuitive privilege. After Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin, he nominated psychoanalysis as the third such revolution. He also characterized the response to such decenterings as “traumas.”
Trauma brings grief. This is normal. In her 1969 book, “On Death and Dying,” the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified the “five stages of grief”: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Perhaps Copernican Traumas are no different…(More)”.