Radical Futures: Events

radical futures presents a sequence of monthly, public conversations meant to tackle the future in a radically new way. the series is part of a broader project meant to explore these crucial questions through interdisciplinary and intergenerational dialogue. 

Are algorithms the new public intellectuals?

It is hardly controversial to note the decline of the public intellectual’s role in our culture. The mid to late twentieth century has felled more public intellectuals than it has produced; television, radio and the press have all distanced themselves from the longform interview and academic thinkers, even juggernauts as Chomsky, E. O. Wilson, and others. The public intellectual’s role of observing, synthesizing, and re-presenting culture to itself has arguably been replaced by a modern successor: the Algorithm. With the rise of public-scale usage of private data, one’s experience of the informatic world is more and more curated to and for our interests- our intellectual pursuits are now mediated by ever more efficient algorithmic systems. Where before we might peruse the bibliographies of our favourite intellectual’s magnum opi, we now receive automated recommendations from the likes of google scholar and academia.edu. Where does the role of public intellectual lie in tomorrow’s digital culture? What is gained -and what is lost- as we transition into new forms of curating and disseminating knowledge?

The meeting

On October 2nd, the night’s attendants included undergraduates, graduate students, alums and visiting professors. A “public intellectual” was understood to mean any individual who regularly shares their thoughts on a wide array of topics to a broad audience, catering particularly to topics of public interest, and prototypically -though not necessarily- being of academic heritage. The question was posed: Are algorithms fulfilling this role? Xin Wei -check out his ‘Prototyping Social Forms’ on our website- raised an initial, but crucial point: algorithms are processes, not entities, and one should avoid the problem of reification in discussing them when presented alongside human interlocutors. This was problematized by a recent graduate in anthropology, who pointed out that algorithmic processes can functionally replace individual persons by taking on their utility: mediating, organizing, and disseminating information. Furthermore, one can imagine an algorithmic intellectual: one who produces results based on a set of strict rules. A non-algorithmic intellectual then tantalizes the imagination: the attendees proposed Deleuze as a possible candidate.

Inevitably the conversation turned to politics- the interests of (the mostly corporate) algorithmic designers were put in question, but then (in the spirit of the evening) the question was radically re-imagined: much like how nowadays professional chess players engage in so-called Centaur Matches (where each team of humans plays cooperates with an AI), we might imagine a future in which human shepherds act as rudders to algorithms functioning as intellectuals, teachers, presidents... This is hardly science fiction: surveillance, the military, the economy… all are already to some degree “Centaur Matches”. The point of literacy was raised: as more and more of our societal infrastructure becomes computational, Java, Python, and other coding languages become a sort of Cybernetic Lingua Franca. There is no doubt that code is becoming a language of power: we might imagine a time in which code is taught in public schools- a society in which code is an official language, perhaps taught in immersion programs. The evening ranged over a broad swath of topics, and marked an expansive and exciting inauguration to the “Radical Futures” series.