Abstract
Some enlightenment regarding the project to mechanise reason. The assembly line of machine learning: data, algorithm, model. The training dataset: the social origins of machine intelligence. The history of AI as the automation of perception. The learning algorithm: compressing the world into a statistical model. All models are wrong, but some are useful. World to vector: the society of classification and prediction bots. Faults of a statistical instrument: the undetection of the new. Adversarial intelligence vs. statistical intelligence: labour in the age of AI.
Highlights
The Nooscope is a cartography of the limits of artificial intelligence, intended as a provocation to both computer science and the humanities
Borrowing the idea from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the Nooscope diagram applies the analogy of optical media to the structure of all machine learning apparatuses
Discussing the power of his calculus ratiocinator and ‘characteristic numbers’, Leibniz made an analogy with instruments of visual magnification such as the microscope and telescope
Summary
The Nooscope is a cartography of the limits of artificial intelligence, intended as a provocation to both computer science and the humanities. The modern project to mechanise human reason has clearly mutated, in the twenty first century, into a corporate regime of knowledge extractivism and epistemic colonialism.2 This is unsurprising, since machine learning algorithms are the most powerful algorithms for information compression. Staying with the analogy of optical media, the information flow of machine learning is like a light beam that is projected by the training data, compressed by the algorithm and diffracted towards the world by the lens of the statistical model. The Nooscope diagram aims to illustrate two sides of machine learning at the same time: how it works and how it fails—enumerating its main components, as well as the broad spectrum of errors, limitations, approximations, biases, faults, fallacies and vulnerabilities that are native to its paradigm.6 This double operation stresses that AI is not a monolithic paradigm of rationality but a spurious architecture made of adapting techniques and tricks. The actual problem is the black box rhetoric, which is closely tied to conspiracy theory sentiments in which AI is an occult power that cannot be studied, known, or politically controlled
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