Let's treat AI like our children

Nicolas Berggruen

Creative Commons/Pixabay)

Nicolas Berggruen is chairman of the Berggruen Institute and publisher of The WorldPost.

Will super-intelligent machines be our servants or masters? This is a misleading way of thinking because it treats artificial intelligence and humans as if they were fundamentally separate categories.

Instead, what seems to be emerging is something more like human-AI hybrids, extending and transforming our cognition and consciousness. We see the first traces of these hybrids in everyday experiences such as driving around with digital mapping technologies, which have reshaped our sense of space. Similarly, on social media, algorithms generating our news feed have helped to reshape what we know about politics and the world. For now, of course, such software from the likes of Google and Facebook remains air-gapped from the wetware in our heads. But this may change, as neuroscientific advances are enabling direct brain-to-computer interfaces.

Read more at The WorldPost.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE