News/Research

Conference Grant Reports: William Morgan at Politics of the Machines

25 Jul, 2024

Conference Grant Reports: William Morgan at Politics of the Machines

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. William Morgan presented "Human-AI Interaction Design (HAIID): Synthetic Personae, Shoggoths and Alignment" at the 4th Politics of the Machines conference. From William:

This past April, I attended the 4th Politics of the Machines conference hosted in Aachen Germany. As a whole, the conference centered questions about how scientific and artistic communities ought to respond to contingent technological developments occurring in biomolecular research, in life-like robotics and computational evolution and in social ecologies. In my talk, entitled, "Human-AI Interaction Design (HAIID): Synthetic Personae, Shoggoths and Alignment, I began by screening a portions of a film on HAIID that I had worked on during the inaugural Antikythera studio. The film provided background for my talk's primary argument, namely that the Lovecraftian metaphors which sometimes circulate in AI safety conversations do not represent alternatives to anthropomorphic metaphors but accelerations of them, that is Lovecraft's monsters tell us more about ourselves than anything else. Necessary then to make sense of artificial intelligence, I argued, were cognition mechanisms more similar in scale to AI, for example online games that might activate humans' latent potential for swarm-like behaviors.

During the conference, I had conversations with multiple members of the SEADS (Space Ecologies Art and Design) collective, a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural collective of artists, scientists, engineers and activists. I was particularly interested in a work they presented called EXOMOON, which brought audiences into an immersive theater experience that explores humanity's future as a space-dwelling species.

Finally, I participated in a workshop playtesting the latest board game produced by the research & design studio "internet teapot" called, "Algorithms of Late-Capitalism" (pictured). In the game, players were figured as cyborgs, reigned over by a Sentient Machine Cult and as such had to navigate a new societal algocracy composed of rigid data structures and opaque algorithms. The board game was presented as a design experiment, a medium to endow participants with an alternative means of collectively exploring (un)desirable technological futures.