<nettime> AI's not Deciphering DNA

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Interesting article from Quanta on Thursday, about AI unsurprisingly misreading DNA as an algorithm (i.e. blueprint) rather than part of a living reality-network in time and space:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-human-genomes-tangled-physicality-may-confound-ai-20260618

"Remember, too, that all the players — from transcription factors to noncoding RNAs — are themselves produced from the genome in the same kind of context-dependent process. That makes the genome rather like a recursive, self-referential system that the computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter dubbed “a strange loop.” It acts on itself, mindful of its own history (which determines chromatin conformation and epigenetic markings, say) and heedful of messages from inside and outside the cell. Not, then, a blueprint."

There's no better crit of AI-GPT (and all the warlord broligarchs currently running the show into the ditch) to my present state of mind than this simple, lovely, basic article.  Much of it is thanks to Barbara McClintock and her Nobel from yes over forty years ago now.

It relates to CAE perhaps, and via Hofstadter (quoted above) to autopoiesis, cybernetics, and Varela.  What does the world become when everything looks like a nail?  Maybe we have already been in the "gray goo" stage for quite a while.  Take the view for example of everything human as geological -- we move heat, pressure, matter, minerals, compounds organic and otherwise, just like all geology does -- even plastic, rubber, glass, and steel:  https://aeon.co/essays/the-strange-rocks-that-wouldnt-exist-without-us.  (I've often personally visualized this reality during air travel takeoff, exiting the quasi-crystalline overgrowth of concrete and metal transformed by human action from subsurface to crust, then to eventually again see soil, water, and plants.)

One one level it's "the banality of evil," which I recently wrote a fictional character describing as "the banality of dereliction."  You let the whole system turn into slop-making factories, you get a lot of big piles of waste and nothing else.  We don't even have the excuse of inevitability, just our own callous disregard and that of others.  

And what reduces everything to this aggregated sludge of debased info-pattern and its slagheaps?  The mania for control and domination, a pathological blind excess, which is greed, sometimes called "incontinence."  That includes the greed for control, to algorithmize everything instrumentally, to hell with everything else which is, honestly, everything.  I won't harp on the early modern, much less the premodern, but they saw the prob too (just before us); and Dante called it "a starving wolf that mates with everything," the fiercest threat to a sustainable human existence in this realm.  Others have called it worse.  

Calvino in 6M quotes Hofstadter, not re Strange Loop but his much earlier GEB book, about computers and thinking.  He does so not to praise machines, not at all, but to point out that the only layer at which such nightmares can be truly confronted and averted is the layer of poetry, in the largest sense, which inheres as potential throughout all art, science, and technical production no matter how severe the debasement to greed becomes.

And what are the chromatins and other "enhancers" that regulate good patterns from bad, cyclically and forever in nonlinear consistency, but literature itself in the broadest sense, verbal visuospatial and physically sculptural, the system of all systems of conscience and expression, genetic and otherwise, and therefore the set of all experience, all self and all other?

McClintock!  :)  

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