The New Other in Artificial Intelligence

Humans have evolved to seek patterns within the world in order to create a perceptual representation of the self (Hegel, Philosophy of the mind (W. Wallace, Trans.). Blackmask Online, 1817). However, over the last century, our interactions with other natural entities have become increasingly reduced as a result of the dramatic increase in human-machine interactions (Turkle, Alone together. Basic Books, 2011). Everyday machines operate without a perception of the other. They are activated and perform their functions with precision. Only, when they err do we acknowledge them. The traditional, less is more approach instigated by Dieter Rams in the 1960s has led us to a sterile co-habitation where humans are becoming more machinelike. Rapid consumption of media, increasingly finite attention spans, and emergent everyday AI, such as ChatGPT, are accelerating society away from our natural way of being and becoming, towards a very non-human way of interacting with our everyday environments. As the intentions of everyday machines develop beyond the utile operations they were first conceived to fulfil they will also move closer to the ultimate sphere of otherly conceptualisation, our imagination.
In this chapter, I will explore the need for everyday products to become more relational to the human user and less binary in function. The earliest humans acknowledge the other long before acknowledging themselves depicting animals on cave walls and in sculptures thousands of years before the representation of human form (Weil, New grammar of ornament. Lars Müller Publishers, 20212). Through sensor observations of patterns in movement, colour, and texture, these early humans created intricate murals of the non-human creatures in their world, took on animal personalities, and worshipped beasts as gods. Now in the era of the intelligent machine, these patterns that we are born to interpret are becoming reduced to beeps and blinks… computer says no. As we drift further from those interactions that affirm our humanness, it is imperative that our machines learn to act and react in natural ways (Mehrabian, Non-verbal communication. Aldine Atherton, 1972) by adopting performance art principles into their binary makeup.