Technoculture
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Understanding intelligence, whether we describe it as artificial or not, is an ongoing process.
Discussions about what defines intelligence and the technologies that we now refer to as Artificial Intelligence are not new and reach back into antiquity.
Personally, I don't love the term Artificial Intelligence for a few reasons. Technoculture recognizes that AI is a natural outcome of the process of technological evolution, which itself is a natural extension of the Biosphere. As technology is an inherently natural phenomenon, AI is in this sense not quite artificial. Because definitions of intelligence depend on a great deal of context and are everchanging, this word might limit our understanding of what AI actually is.
Understanding AI means understanding non-human intelligence, a vast endeavor in and of itself rooted in a post-humanist philosophical outlook that parallels the practices and philosophies of many indigenous cultures.
It will require us to examine the implications of defining intelligence and subsequently training AI around primarily Western, White, and cisheteronormative concepts of the mind. It requires us to decenter human thought as the pinnacle of consciousness and cognition and follow the thread of mind that might be present in all parts of nature.
In this section, we'll learn about the fundamental principles that underpin what we define as AI, some of the specific technologies that make it possible, the applications, and how our understanding of it all continues to evolve.