Gao Shiming: The more advanced artificial intelligence becomes, the more humans need artistic intelligence
2024-08-14
한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina
Over the past 30 years, the development of digital intelligence technology has built a variety of digital topics. At present, AI neural networks have trillions of parameters. As this number increases rapidly, digital intelligence technology is penetrating into all human technologies and industries, becoming a new DNA, forming new digital production resources, digital productivity, and digital production relations.
Humans originally expected machine intelligence to replace a large amount of mechanical physical labor and thus liberate us, but they never expected that AI would first replace our knowledge, skills, communication skills, and even "creativity." As a result, more and more people have begun to believe that AI will not only surpass the human brain in information processing speed, memory, and memory capacity, but will also achieve all-round transcendence in terms of expression, insight, content productivity, and even artistic creativity.
Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Intelligence, the Dialectics of Two AIs
I have always believed that artificial intelligence has narrowed our imagination of the future. The science fiction culture of the past 100 years has also narrowed AI itself, transforming AI into some kind of human-like creature and life. In fact, we have never been natural people, but technological people, artificial people, and a technological sensory integrated existence. We should not put ourselves in the opposition between natural people and artificial life, natural people and AI. Today, we are already a composite body.
I have always held a positive attitude towards artificial intelligence. In recent years, AI is becoming a necessary quality for many new professions.
I have three thoughts on this:
First, AI is a mirror of human self-cognition and human social consciousness.
AI not only simulates, extends, enhances and expands human thinking, but also has a huge role in promoting our understanding of human language, thinking and intelligence itself. It makes us rethink what kind of intellectual process human perception, thinking, learning, analysis, reasoning, imagination, planning, creation and even consciousness itself is.
Second, AI is not only a tool for research and manufacturing, but also a tool for perception and thinking.
AI is a part of our life and future. As long as you actively use it, AI is a tool. Otherwise, it will definitely become our gravedigger.
Third, we use and develop AI not to replace existing human capabilities, but to invent new capabilities with unprecedented intelligent entities such as "human + AI".
Through the reference of AI, we further understand what human intelligence is.
Human intelligence is not just calculation or logic. In addition to mathematics, there is also reason. In addition to calculation, there is also experience and intuition, impulse, purpose and planning, insight and vision. We humans not only have ideas, but also sensitivity, not only logical thinking, but also emotional thinking, and more importantly, desires and instincts, care and expectations.
It is precisely because of these that there is "practice" and "action" in the true sense; it is these things beyond calculation that make human intelligence and make people human.
I want to ask - is "AI" an "Agency" or a "Subject"?
People's concerns and cheers about AI all come from their imagination of the impact that AI may have in the future. There is no equation for the mind, and the social mind cannot be solved by algorithms. Can we imagine another form of intelligence that is completely different from human consciousness, based on the Internet, big data, and a super-intelligent computing system formed by countless terminal nodes?
Does this sound like the prototype of the Matrix? But on the other hand, aren't we already in the Matrix?
In any case, I believe that the threat posed by AI to humans still comes from humans themselves.
Artificial intelligence is not intended to be like humans, nor is it intended to replace humans. It has its own future, and multiple futures, an open future.
So, in a speech six years ago, I proposed "Evolving with AI." Of course, I was referring to two AIs, Artificial Intelligence and Artistic Intelligence.
I believe that the more developed artificial intelligence becomes, the more humans will need artistic intelligence; the more developed digital virtual technology and its illusion industry become, the more valuable the artistic experience of body-mind interaction, and the sensibility and interest that come from artistic experience, will become.
Beware that digital virtual technology is abolishing human sensibility
New technologies have constructed various prosthetic limbs for humans. The increasingly large prosthetic limb systems accompanied by digital virtual technology are abolishing our sensibility, separating our body and mind, and then transforming us into a mere consumer. Therefore, the fundamental dilemma of future humans is the poverty of sensibility and the separation of body and mind.
What I call artistic intelligence is precisely the knowledge that is opened up by the skill and comes from artistic experience, a knowledge that is creative and poetic, a knowledge that is activated by the body and mind and empathized with others. Artistic intelligence inspires a state of sensibility and perceptual liberation.
Through new technologies, a very small number of people will turn the vast majority of humanity into useless objects, into consumers of the Matrix that is their daily life, into eternal immersion in a virtual world, and at the same time into naked life and flesh batteries in the wasteland of reality.
The fundamental dilemma of mankind in the future will inevitably be the separation of body and mind, which is a side effect of human-machine integration. This will be a permanent "frozen state" under technological control, which is the end of history and the end of man in the true sense. Breaking this "frozen state" will be a struggle between a very small number of people and almost all of humanity, a struggle between the ultimate consumers of human-machine integration and the ultimate controllers of the same human-machine integration, and a struggle between two "non-humans".
In this era of big data and artificial intelligence, we are "personalized" in the self-dataization of online media, "desocialized" in the online interaction of "friend circle" and "crowdfunding economy", and fall into "functional stupidity" in the increasingly automatic and convenient service system of intelligent technology. Therefore, the global connection of hundreds of millions of netizens established by the intelligent network may only create a "frozen public sphere", where the clamor is just the "useless majority" in the digital media era.
A quarter of the 21st century has passed, and history is advancing rapidly, while human development is lagging behind. In the field of art, today's grand spectacle may exist in name only. The huge inertia of the global market and the lack of good works have made the libido economy of creation and action unsustainable.
Design, which was once the inventor of modern life, the design that constructed a grand social imagination, and the design that was once a revolutionary and liberating force, has been narrowed down to a production link in the global manufacturing chain. It has even been alienated into the libido and catalyst of what Schumpeter called the "spatial reproduction" and "creative destruction" of global capital, and has become the "daytime fireworks" of the consumerist brand war. Design has increasingly become a service industry and a cultural and creative industrialization. What it produces is no longer the vision of a new society or a new way of life, but pure profit and a "creative class" that trembles in front of AIGC.
Calling for Renaissance people in the 21st century to rebuild the "relationship between heaven and man"
Many people have discussed the "Renaissance" in recent years, and I am one of them. The essence of the Renaissance is "the discovery of the world and the discovery of man", which I believe is also the fundamental task of art in the 21st century.
In 15th and 16th century Europe, the “discovery of the world” refers to an important external factor of the Renaissance – the Age of Discovery, or the Age of Geographical Discovery. Today, the Internet is the Age of Discovery in the 21st century, and with it comes a virtual world and multiple worlds built by digital technology – this is the “discovery of the world” in the 21st century.
In Florence, the discovery of man referred to modern medicine based on anatomy and the self-declaration of humanism - man as the center of the universe and the measure of all things. In the 21st century, on the one hand, the exploration of the life history of the planet "Deep Time Earth" makes us rethink the meaning and future of the "Anthropocene"; on the other hand, the development of artificial intelligence is initiating another round of self-cognition and self-discovery of mankind.
The new technologies of the 21st century are creating a new humanity. The mission of future art is to enable people to maintain their emotional vitality and spiritual autonomy in an increasingly intelligent, automated and virtualized society, and to settle their bodies and minds in a multi-media and mixed reality environment.
Only by finding and taking the “other pole of dialectics” outside the technologization of nature and the naturalization of technology, the technologization of people and the humanization of technology, can we become producers again. The meaning of becoming producers again is to regain our own nature and subjectivity, so we need to reinvent our art and revive the creative perception, expression and production that originated from art.
Using AI to create is to collaborate with an anthropomorphic big Other, to create together with countless anonymous people and all living things. From a positive perspective, AI is called the new industrial revolution. Is it "liberation-empowerment-enablement", or is it an anesthetic or a placebo? In the AI era, our popular culture, our public and common are undergoing fundamental changes. Can AI bring about a kind of popularization of art - an art for everyone, a new Renaissance?
Driven by the two "AIs", it is possible to develop a kind of 21st century Renaissance man.
This should be a new subject that blends perfectly with artificial intelligence, and develops together with the two AIs in the struggle and coupling, gradually forming a "human + AI" complex that can control algorithms and even surpass algorithms. This composite subject will learn and create on a scale far beyond that of natural humans, and in the long years to come, it will gather all human knowledge and activate all human civilization genes, thus forming a "communication" and "change" that transcends scale.
I believe that the Renaissance man of the 21st century is such a person: his/her vision covers the ancient and modern times, China and the world, so he/she has a profound judgment and understanding; he/she maintains a fresh sense of perception in the ocean of data, so he/she has the insight of "taking things from the body and from far away"; he/she jumps out of the professional barriers to face the problem field, so he/she has the action power to integrate knowledge and technology across boundaries. More importantly, he/she must have a strong curiosity, rich imagination, strong desire for creation, and a kind of transcendence. It is this transcendence that enables him/her to escape from the involution of life, the internal consumption of the spirit, the daily addiction and sinking of consumerism, and to achieve spiritual autonomy and freedom of life in the labor of art and the manipulation of skills.
It is this creativity that enables him/her to "understand the virtue of the gods and the feelings of all things" and re-establish his/her own "relationship between heaven and man" in the 21st century in the metaverse of digital survival, the future scenario of mixed reality, and the new life state of man-machine co-construction and carbon-silicon integration.
Author: Gao Shiming
Text: Gao Shiming (President of China Academy of Art, Chairman of Zhejiang Artists Association) Editor: Fan Xin Responsible Editor: Shao Ling
Please indicate the source when reprinting this article.
