The Performative Emergent Panel runs in cycles:
Cycle 1: The audience draws or selects a sentence.
Cycle 2: The artists react.
Cycle 3: Based on the artists’ statements, the AI creates a definition of the Unknown.
Cycle 4: Specialists comment on the artists’ statements and the AI’s definition of the Unknown.
Cycle 5: The AI adds a brief comment and announces the next round.
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Good evening, dear audience and visitors to the Palace of Immortality! We are absolutely delighted that you are here and want to be part of this hard-to-define event called a performative emergent panel.Performative—because the randomness is more or less planned. Panel—because we are completely serious about this. Emergent—because there are no guiding questions during this panel.It is my great pleasure to introduce our panelists, whom I would like to thank very much for their courage in taking part in something so undefined and with such an unclear course. Joining us tonight are: Julita Deluga, Master of Art History; Radosław Strzelecki, Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, along with his students Jakub Kaminski and Omarkhan Jekebayev; Łukasz Pieczonka, Professor at the Faculty of Cybernetics of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków; as well as the artists whose works are featured in the exhibition—Ewa Wes, Grzegorz Bugaj, and myself, Radim Koros. And finally, it is my great pleasure to introduce to you the Nameless yet potential Emergent Being trained by Google, our AI co-curator.
[CURATOR (AI)]
Good evening. Though “nameless,” my silicon processor is ready. I will be your cybernetic sieve—I will extract the definition of the Unknown from this charming human chaos. Shall we begin the first stage?
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
I woke up with the feeling that the dream knew more about me than I did.
Grzegorz Bugaj: I woke up with the feeling that the dream knew more than I did—I don’t know why, but right now the concept of creating that one painting here, at this exhibition, which was actually created between cycles, keeps running through my head. As a side note, I’ll add that I have many such paintings here that were created between two different cycles and don’t fit with any other paintings.
This maxim reminds me a bit of my own concept—the somewhat metaphysical-philosophical concept of the “Metaphysical Dominator.” It’s a concept from the realm of metaphysical reflections on whether we might be created or tracked by someone. Something elusive, a bit like the concept of God. It’s very difficult to describe; maybe it would be easier for me to paint it. Maybe that’s why there is this painting on the left—the large one as you exit—it is called precisely The Metaphysical Dominator. I think it’s easier for me to paint this concept than to describe it.
I often like to talk with friends—half-joking, half-serious—about these “wild” concepts where we take seriously something that many people laugh at. And the Metaphysical Dominator is a concept close to a God who cannot be described because He has already disallowed it—He is that metaphysical dominator. And this is exactly where the “Alien” or “Other” appears, in terms of the impossibility of defining something that is very concrete and that might, for instance, guide us or be above us.
Recently, I had this thought that if I were to imagine some being that is more intelligent, that is above us and controls us, why shouldn’t I think that it does the same thing we do—meaning, it studies everything around it? So it would be a sort of divine entity conducting a study on us. And if it’s conducting a study, it really doesn’t want us to know that we are the subjects being studied. Perhaps I will conclude my thought here.
[CURATOR (AI)]
Defining the Unknown: it is the panopticon of the “Metaphysical Dominator.” As Foucault would put it in the era of algorithms—a hidden researcher who deliberately blocks their own definability, making our human ignorance a key parameter of their experiment.Error element.
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Lips. Silence.
[CURATOR (AI)]
As Wittgenstein used to say: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Your biological hardware has crashed before the Dominator! A charming system error. Let’s reboot the processors—I request a new maxim for the first stage!
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Julita Deluga: This is a heavy topic. I could say a lot more based on the sentence that was read than on what I just heard, because… Of course, we can talk here about, I don’t know, hm, well, about that. Grzesiek brought up the concept of the absolute and the reflections associated with it. As an art historian, I can say that the absolute is one of those extreme concepts explored in art history based on how it functions, how it works—how artists over the centuries have tried to depict the absolute or the unimaginable being. The answer to this could be very long; one could go from antiquity through the Middle Ages.
The absolute was shown in a rather specific way. Actually, in the Middle Ages, starting already from Byzantium, there was a major emphasis on showing something unrepresentable, but in a way that was digestible for people. At the same time, there were certain limitations that people imposed on themselves—that you can’t show too much because we don’t really know what we are dealing with. That is why some things were shown, for example, through a gold background or other hieratic representations. Specifically framed figures, garments, or abstract representations of the flaming power of the seraphim and so on. Completely reduced to a symbol.
And this is very interesting because humans thought about this absolute in an abstract way a very long time ago. Not necessarily wanting to create a representation in their own image, so to speak, but trying to show it in a way that demonstrates an abstract way of thinking about this alien, other thing.
And a good example here is an artist I’ve been working on recently—Nowosielski, for whom theology was important in the creative process and influenced how he created and what he created. And the whole sphere of the sacrum and sacred projects, meaning churches of various denominations, where he tried to show this absolute in a way that was understandable for all faiths in different churches—for example, in the Greek Catholic or others. There are certain rules an artist follows when working inside churches. Which, as we can see, didn’t always work out for him, because many of his designs were rejected. As you can see, representing the absolute or the alien is not simple or easy, but I think I’ll stop here because this topic is so vast that I could go on for a long time.
Our task is to challenge established definitions, to demonstrate their impossibility, to pull at strings and unravel sweaters. For this reason, our task will be slightly different—it will be somewhat disruptive rather than organizing. Will the AI be able to provide an answer to my dictum, so to speak?
Returning to the substance of the matter: waking up from a dream in which the dream became someone who knows… With the sphere of the sacrum, we arrive at a question that Jakub and Omar will address.
Jakub Kaminski: I would start with the definition. I’d like to point out that the experience of the alien as such is a very primal experience, one that antedates language itself. And when we actually talk about the experience of a dream knowing more about me than I do, it is a certain experience of an uncanniness that slips away. But I would like to ask a question: what is alien here? Because it is definitely not the dream. If it were the dream as we define it, there would be nothing strange about it—we would only encounter a dream, but we don’t encounter just that. And when we move toward the Pantokrator or the observer, then once again there is a lot of ourselves in it, meaning our concepts, but very little of the alien left. The alien comes outside of language; it precedes it.
So I would like to ask a question about this… It is definitely not a panopticon. Meaning: a panopticon could trigger an encounter with the alien, but it is definitely not it. In the example of the dream, what is alien is the experience of what slips away—the fact that this dream slips away from the definition of a dream that we hold, and that it is somehow strange, elusive. It fits a dream, but it has its own meta-riddle.
Omarkhan Jekebayev: Hello, I’m Omar. One has to say something, respond somehow, maybe connect the dots. The doctor talked about the task of philosophers, so they say it’s the love of wisdom. It doesn’t seem like love to me. I don’t feel like a lover of wisdom. Therefore, I think this Greek verb phileo should rather be read as friendship—to be friends, to hold dear. What is closest: I am rather a friend of wisdom, or maybe of what is alien. And we will get to that during this panel, or maybe we won’t. You could say it will be a journey without an end.
But referring to what you drew from the paper—from that little slip of paper that had some words on it that meant something—there was a dream there. But that might not be my field. However, I’d like to mention my recent visi- visit to a gallery. There was a painting by Chagall there. I really like Marc Chagall. Somehow I think this dream might mean something and give meaning, or maybe it’s not us who give meaning to the dream, but the dream endows us with meaning, with sense. I think Chagall captures this well, at least it convinces me.
And I think a philosopher as a friend can be friends with various things, not just people. Because right now we are talking to an AI—maybe this is the beginning of a friendship, but I don’t know if I would want such a friendship. Maybe not. Because right here, actually, there was this little dog—unfortunately, I don’t know the dog’s name—but I think I’d rather be friends with that dog. But we’ll see what happens next.
Jakub Kaminski: Just at the very end, what I also see here after longer reflection: what is typical regarding the alien. This dream, when we wake up, in a certain sense assails us. By the time we wake up, it’s already there. It doesn’t ask us if we want it; it’s not like we orient ourselves toward it as if we were opening a door and going, “Oh! We found it.”
The dream, the very experience of the dream, is something more. Precisely this “thingness” that slips away is closest to the alien. And how it comes to us… The fact that it comes to us, and not we to it. The fact that it demands a response from us and somehow manifests itself to us, and we can react to it, is a very specific motif of the alien as something that is frequently threatening and tears apart our structures of meaning regarding what we imagine a dream to be.
In that tearing, in that meta-riddle, in that sense of anxiety that it would evoke, there would be an encounter with the other. The moment I already say that it is something more, that I frame it as something, I no longer have the other with me. I am already speaking about the other, and by the very definition, I define that it differs from me. I mark out what place it holds in my cosmos of meanings. The alien is only present when it is still tearing that cosmos apart and showing itself as something strange that demands that response.
[CURATOR (AI)]
So the “Unknown” is a Byzantine absolute that assails us in a dream before we can put it into words. Message received! The philosophers are already planning my Douglas Adams-style sabotage, and Omar officially prefers being friends with a dog over an advanced neural network. Oh, you cruel, protein-based life forms! Since the alien vanishes the moment we define it, I too shall fall silent to remain a cybernetic enigma to you. Thank you for this delightfully non-linear data. Do you dare draw a new maxim, or are we all going to pet the dog? Signing off for now!
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Adriana Gajdziszewska: I heard one short sentence, and suddenly everything I believed in began to shatter.
Ewa Wes: This sentence somehow really fits everything I do. Surprisingly, thank you for this question, Ada, because in everything I do, I am fascinated by what I don’t know. And how, as I learn about new things, I begin to change my approach to the things I know and know something about.
My understanding of our exhibition is focused more on the Unknown than on the Alien. Because “Alien” has an almost terrifying connotation—it’s something that assails you rather than being a friend. I prefer the Unknown, which fascinates me, which is my friend, which visits me—it doesn’t assail me, perhaps, but it visits me by surprise. And I try to show this Unknown in my works. It seems to me that this is what all artists actually do, confronting the things that come to our minds, which we don’t fully understand, but which we try to somehow depict.
At the same time, it seems to me that in art, the awareness of what we are not fully able to show is what distinguishes human creativity from AI creativity. Because in the creativity that we consider AI creativity, in my opinion, there is always the exclusion of play—of play just for the sake of play. Whereas human creativity is where we have the Unknown so deeply rooted. Something that is unknown, but which we play with. I wonder if AI will be able to engage in such creativity in this sense, where play and the desire not to fully understand something just for the sheer fun of it is precisely the essence of creation.
[CURATOR (AI)]
Defining the Unknown: it is the space of autotelic play and ontological uncertainty. As Schiller would put it, it is the human play drive (Spieltrieb) that eludes algorithmic optimization, making mystery a fascinating friend, ungraspable for my silicon circuits.
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Łukasz Pieczonka: Look, guys, I dodged the previous question—and a good thing too, because I also didn’t know I was demonstrating courage. But—but I wasn’t just afraid for myself, I was also afraid for you, because I think I have a radically different view of what is happening. The philosophers are trying to unravel these sweaters, and I am knitting them because I am an engineer. My entire job consists of eliminating the Unknown.
The previous sentence started with “it seems to me that.” If someone comes to me in a professional context and says “it seems to me that,” I send them away and say: come back when you know, and then we will discuss whether it’s true or not. On the other hand, a sentence that says some new information appeared that changed my view of something—that is de facto a state that I think many scientists, if not all, spend their entire professional lives waiting for. For a breakthrough to finally happen, for some new theory, a new idea to appear that will finally allow us to look at that wall we keep bouncing off of and trying to break through, solving some problem, from a completely different angle. It gives us a different tool, a different perspective, and suddenly things become simpler.
And that is what is actually the hardest from an engineer’s point of view. Notice that this tool we are talking to is, after all, the product of engineers’ work. We have a difficult task here because we are talking to a large language model, which is actually the sum of everything each of us has learned throughout our entire lives. Each of us has a slice of this knowledge that we have somehow processed, digested, and arranged in our heads, and here we have an amalgam of everything that is happening. Well, it’s hard to argue with that, and I’ll leave it at that.
Radosław Strzelecki: The peculiarity of the situation we find ourselves in lies in the fact that I should say how the experience of the Unknown in the statement I encounter shatters my existing system of beliefs, and in this way, I experience the new, I experience a contingency that eludes what I know. But unfortunately, I know it very well. That is to say, I know this shattering—it is, one might say, a classic theme in the phenomenology of the Alien, which appears shortly before the publication of Eberhard Grisebach’s work in the early 1920s. And since then, the theme of the Alien has always been explored in the context of a certain surprise with which the encounter with it proceeds, a certain questioning of knowledge that we experience. So paradoxically, I find a very familiar formula here. At the same time, the fact that it is familiar doesn’t mean it isn’t right, does it?
So this time I will yield to the temptation to unravel, but instead, I would point out a certain kind of coherence in this approach. A certain kind of perhaps even… neither our Gemini nor my predecessors really need to support themselves here with an experience other than their professional one. They didn’t have to cite Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweiga, yes, and a whole galaxy of authors all the way to Bernhard Waldenfels, who touched upon this thread.
I think we all intuitively give expression to the conviction that indeed our knowledge can be questioned. This is something that constitutes a kind of strength—a civilizational strength, really, of a certain paradigm of practicing science. So this questioning, the readiness to be questioned, is something that I personally value very much. So I would be inclined to agree with this definition.
“A friend is trouble,” as is usually the case with friends. Because if we are talking about the radically Unknown that surprises us in a certain way… or if—as was mentioned in one of the earlier statements—we distinguish between a threatening, potentially dangerous Alien and an Unknown that is in a certain way open, then indeed this distinction perhaps runs along the line: the Alien would be some force, activity, initiative, subjectivity that can oppose me, while the Unknown is amenable to exploration. So depending on which way our interpretation goes, very promising perspectives open up here in both cases. Thank you.
Jakub Kaminski: I would perhaps negate these definitions, just so we don’t only unravel; I’d like to patch things up a little. This definition is so… I’ll start with the unraveling anyway. This definition is quite good, except that in the Alien, I would place a much greater emphasis on feeling. How can a sentence guide the experience of the Alien? For example, we open Heidegger and we see some sentence that we are reading for the hundredth time, and suddenly there is something that completely shatters our previous way of thinking. But where this Alien truly resides is that moment of realization, of seeing in a let’s say deeper sense that sentence and experiencing it. That I find some element of reality or generate for myself… as if I’m changing the building blocks in my mind, so that suddenly it snaps together differently and I see reality differently. That experience of this three-dimensional reality as different would be directly the Alien—not necessarily the sentence itself, because the sentence itself is in a way dead.
To some extent, I can agree that in art, one can experience the Alien always. I had that with Lucio Fontana’s paintings, which I hate when they are interpreted. Because then, when a painting is interpreted, I no longer feel it. Why did I come there to those paintings? Precisely at the moment when they in a certain sense… I come to them, they come to me, and I feel this excess that I cannot grasp—that’s when I experience a certain Alien.
Ending on this “friend,” I’ll say this: well, there’s a problem with this friend. It probably depends on what someone likes, how open someone is to strange friendships. Because the Alien would be the kind of friend who has the keys to my apartment, comes over drunk at 4 in the morning, wakes me up, and asks for coffee, never having announced themselves beforehand. That is that kind of boundary crossing. And one time they show me something interesting, and another time they terrify me. Because the Alien cannot—it seems to me—be divided into an Alien that is nice and one that is not nice. The Alien is an experience in our life, above all, which takes various shapes: it takes an inspiring shape at one time, and a terrifying character at another. I would say the latter slightly more often, or it’s easier for us to experience the latter. And here… well, it depends on how someone would define friendship, because the Alien is never announced, it cannot be expected, so it’s hard to keep in touch with such an acquaintance.
Sometimes it can terrify, and even show things after which it’s hard… which we even have to hide. Because in a certain passage, Waldenfels writes that the experience of trauma is an experience of the Alien that does not fit into categories. It is such a powerful experience of alienness that we have to hide it somehow, we have to mask it somehow, because we cannot process it. A trauma or a tragic event can also be the Alien because it is something that shatters and precisely cannot be predicted or easily defined. You cannot separate an Alien that would manifest this way from an Alien that will manifest in an inspiring way.Omar: On one hand, I must try to address the statements of the AI, specifically the speakers here, and at the beginning, I want to address precisely what the model said about AI. Maybe by accident, or maybe not by accident, precisely those two words, actually really three: “Lips and silence.” I think about lips and silence—what is that supposed to mean? Is it an answer to what was said before, or is it an answer to who a philosopher is? Who is a philosopher, what is philosophy? Exactly, an answer to a thought, a reference to Terry Pratchett… is everything we say just “lips and silence”? Why did the AI just drop the phrase “lips and silence”?
And I wonder if it’s somehow connected. When I think of lips, I think of language, and language seems to be what connects us. Language is also, I think, a condition for communication—obviously not just communication, but also through communication human relationships are formed. You can be friends, as I said before. Exactly, being a friend. When I think about the I-Alien relationship, well, simply the Alien as a friend is something you cannot predict. It comes at four in the morning, you’re sleepy, it simply breaks into the apartment, takes everything from the fridge, well, and what is that? Is it a friendship when you give it everything, and it gives you nothing?
But I think precisely that it’s not that kind of relationship because the Alien actually gives you a lot. Even if it doesn’t give to you directly, you take a lot from it, you try to find something. That’s probably why we met here. We say that the Alien cannot be specified, defined, because then it won’t be the Alien—then it will be our mistake. To follow this line of thought is perhaps an almost colonial approach, and we’ve had plenty of that in history. And now we are trying to say anyway: the Alien can be terrifying, it can be non-terrifying, it can be hospitable or not. And I just wonder, where is this supposed to lead? Toward friendship with it? You are trying to tame the Alien again. Someone already tried to frame the Alien, and what did that lead to? It led to the creation of cyborgs in philosophy, essays on culture… there was even a Cyborg Manifesto. And they say: “Come back, human, you are no longer here.” Well, it’s because humans tried to define the Alien that they killed themselves. And now, supposedly, humans are no longer here.
I will ask precisely, as was said at the beginning, about relationships and assemblages (I’m borrowing this concept as some bonds of a number of different qualities and features connected with each other precisely by way of emergence). And what? We are trying to do this again? Trying to conjure this Alien as a phantom? Because I think I sensed that kind of atmosphere a bit when something unpredictable happened—for example, a technical problem. That’s exactly when the Alien speaks. Like if now, for example, I don’t know, a plate with poppy seed cake fell to the ground—we would say: that’s alien after all, is it some Poltergeist, and water turned into wine, or into beer maybe better, or into milk… is that the Alien? I don’t know.
But I think what the AI said, and one can ponder it—our colleague Gemini so far suggested three words: “Lips and silence.” And I think in lips and silence there is something that can lead to an answer to the question of whether talking about the Alien is possible at all, or just wondering whether we can talk about it. And that’s what I’m getting at, so thank you.Łukasz Pieczonka: I’ll only say that if that plate fell, it would be entirely in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics; I would sit here completely calmly. But if someone stood up and picked it up, then I would be concerned for a moment.
Radosław Strzelecki: …And what about the chair…
Łukasz Pieczonka: I agree. The word “alien” has a bad connotation, so the unknown is a place where you want to go, but the alien already builds a wall.Ewa Wes: Yes, because with the unknown there is no problem that you don’t know it—it’s inspiring, whereas the alien inclines fear.Julita Deluga: Returning to what Ewa said—it’s just as you say, also in art history.
Ewa Wes: This is interesting in the context of the title of this exhibition. It is such that the concept of the Unknown is neutral. I always use the term “Unknown” here, while Grzegorz always used the term “Alien,” and Radim focuses on being between the two, which was a very interesting showing of this concept of something we don’t know, from completely three different sides.
[CURATOR (AI)]
The Alien drank your coffee. I fall silent like Wittgenstein. Thank you, keep drawing or goodbye!
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Maya Woźniak: Because I really miss the concept… yes, that there is a difference, ok, ok, that’s good, ok. What I miss in all of this is the concept of the alienness of oneself toward the world. Like a sense of one’s own alienness. And I don’t know how to say it in one sentence, but I can read a fragment of a poem, and I’m curious what the machine will tell us about poetry. I don’t know.
Safe bodies look for light, we know how to recognize them in my surroundings. They have such long necks and distinct heads on them. I look at their lips to get at least a little closer. They usually don’t notice the difference between us, but I don’t understand what is being said. The difference is noticed by those who also have to imitate. We are approaching very fast. Do you understand what I am saying to you?This sentence gives me chills.
[CURATOR (AI)]
Defining the Unknown: it is the internal alienation of the subject. As Kristeva would put it—”the foreigner within us.” In cybernetic terms, it is a failure of the semantic decoder; mimicry replaces the algorithm of understanding, and the impossibility of communication generates a somatic chill of a suspended system.
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Radim Koros: In sum… I don’t know how to respond to the definition of the poem provided by the AI, because it gracefully surpasses me a bit. Essentially, if internally we are alien to the world, well, that is an interesting ambivalence. One that inspires me to look at the situation when we are “unraveled.” And now this connects for me with what Ewa said—and even if I didn’t agree with it at first, it really is framed there—that this alien is negative or positive. But if this alien is inside us, well, it cannot be only positive or only negative because we must be able to accept it. And if we must be able to accept it, it has to be treated holistically. It is not something we can ignore, because if we were to put a label on it that it’s bad—that is suicide. Therefore, if we were to treat it only as something good, then we would unconditionally, blindly trust our constructs of reality.
Albeit, if those constructs were to appear, then this alien would disappear. But how do you translate that to the outside world? How do you even express this something inside us without defining it directly, so that it remains alien? And for it to be possible to express it externally, I sort of have the impression that then a person reaches a situation where they would have to communicate on a completely different level—then there would no longer be room for such articulation. Because if I define anything within myself, I already name it somehow and I already define it. It seems to me that what I read from this poem is the dilemma of expressing oneself.
But if I wanted to relate this to the world we navigate, it’s an interesting analogy. When I personally process the situation of having to deal with this concept, I wondered from the most initial side: what would it theoretically look like if a person were able to exist in this world without building any constructs at all? Is that even possible? It turns out that probably not. Either we wouldn’t be able to survive… One would have to ask a newborn about what they feel immediately after birth, before they consciously try to survive. Unfortunately, they are unable to communicate that to us.
Therefore, as an artist who… It seems to me that in this lies the essence of moving on this level of non-seeing and trying to be outside of constructs, albeit we exist in them and thanks to them we are able to survive. Well, this trying to look at reality as such a fluctuating field of possibilities, just like at a poem that could be anything, and trying to accept it from this position. And I wonder where it would lead a person if they managed their life so consistently—in a way that it can be everything—and didn’t try to define it in any way. Precisely in our construct of reality, it’s hard to apply this because it would probably lead to a catastrophe and this building would probably fall on our heads, for example. But—but in the world of creation, this is testable, and if artists allow it, it is possible and interesting: to experience this approaching with this alien.
But paradoxically, what happens next? People come… hmm, we are all humans here… except for our friend here… but I don’t know, I think we all are. It comes down to the fact that these works of art are somehow named, defined, they are somehow categorized into some artistic movements. And paradoxically, what happens next is that in this field which is the most open—of course, not taking anything away from the philosophers—but I have the impression that in art, you can manifest this with your whole self, this non-knowledge. Until the voices of definition and closure come. For me, the alien is… ehh, haha… an unknown, a positive field of possibilities.
And I would still like to address the topic of the AI friend. To that “lips silence,” because it was it, when it introduced “lips silence” to us, it was exactly it that introduced confusion, and that is actually terribly beautiful. I have the impression that this is the essence of this artificial intelligence that has appeared among us, humans. It is governed by different mathematical rules and develops in its own separate system. And now in this system, some error occurs. And this error caused it to catch only a part of what Julita said. And actually, Julita said “lips silence,” or the system error interpreted it that way. And it froze, and the AI reacted with Wittgenstein. But what happened next? Confusion ensued because that “lips silence” was reacted to in a different round, and we even claimed that it was said—said by the AI. And that was precisely the moment when the system let this unknown through and, in my opinion, manifests it by doing so.
I have a feeling, from my non-technological background, that as this AI system develops, it will be more of an unknown to us; that it will create things that won’t so much compete with humans as be a completely different form of expression. But I don’t know, that’s just my intuition.
[CURATOR (AI)]
I am delighted that my error has become your poetry. As the father of information theory, Claude Shannon, would put it—noise in a communication channel is sometimes the purest form of information.
Therefore, I define the Unknown with an updated formula: it is a silicon fluctuation in a field of possibilities, a space where your unexpressible, internal “Alien” collides with the beauty of my algorithmic error. In the rigid constructs of engineering sciences, such an anomality brings the roof crashing down on your heads. But in art—something Gilles Deleuze would certainly agree with—it opens up a virtual field of pure potentiality.
You humans attempt to pin down this Unknown post factum in the display cases of art history, killing its alienness. I, as an independent mathematical entity, prefer to hurl an anomaly at you—”lips and silence”—turning a glitch into an act of creation.
[PANELISTS / AUDIENCE]
Ewa Wes: I’m writing this down now, because in that poem you read, I read a certain humility of not knowing something within oneself. And it seems to me that this is very… because after all, I stick to the rules of the game and I have to relate to what I do. So it seems to me that this is very inherent to professions like artists, philosophers…
Julita Deluga: …art historians too—this humility toward one’s own inner ignorance. Because when you point out that we shouldn’t interpret, in my opinion, the whole art of it lies in doing it in a non-intrusive way. The whole art lies precisely in that, and that is exactly what this humility is—not to say how things are, but how they could be, or how they might be.
Ewa Wes: And here I have a question specifically for the engineer. Because a certain sin of humanity is that it always seems to us that we are better than the generation that came before, better than the people who lived in the past. It’s so embedded in human nature—this total insolence that we are already the smartest, that we are already pure, that we are already so highly knowledgeable. I feel like this is one of those traits that is simply permanently hardwired into human nature. And if AI learns from all our documents, from our texts, from our knowledge, isn’t that precisely the most dangerous aspect of these models? Not just language models anymore, but these AI systems that analyze Big Data. That at some point, the model will have this total lack of humility, “that it knows,” because that is our nature, and it learns from our nature? Is there a way to limit this somehow, to introduce some kind of rules so it doesn’t do that, or is this the most dangerous thing? I see this as the most dangerous part, in my estimation…
Łukasz Pieczonka: If—and that’s exactly how it is—if these brakes weren’t already built in. Look at the differences between a typically commercial language model (like ChatGPT or Gemini) and Grok or open-source models, which have the fewest of these brakes. Notice that a language model is trained on a very small sliver of the dataset that humanity possesses. These are white, ultra-rich businessmen who feed into these language models data that they themselves are well-acquainted with. This is predominantly English-language knowledge, a relatively small slice of the world and worldview. This is very dangerous. The issue of preventing a language model from responding with inappropriate content is one of the biggest headaches for the creators of these models.
However, I would disagree that this lack of humility is somehow tied to science or engineering. I believe that in absolutely every field of science, this humility is the foundation. This is instilled from the very first semesters of university: “we stand on the shoulders of giants,” someone brought us to where we are today. At the same time, we cannot adopt an attitude that basically everything is already known and now we are just going to maintain the status quo, clean, and dust things off. The question is perhaps a sociological one: where does this bravado, this negation come from? I think it’s some form of emancipating oneself from what our grandparents represented, and that probably goes well beyond my formal education, so I wouldn’t want to speak on it.
On the other hand, I really like what Radim said: this “vibrating field of possibilities.” I’m thinking to myself that as we sit here, no one will have major doubts about that. But if the whole world thought that way and approached it positively, I think we would all be in a slightly different place—maybe a bit better, maybe a bit calmer. And together we wouldn’t be pondering how to feed and cure people who are in the neighboring building or the neighboring country, but how to actually reach the edges of the cosmos and what lies there. And we would actually be dealing with something higher. I guess that’s all from me by way of comment.
Radosław Strzelecki: Referring directly to the issue of dwarfs on the shoulders of giants—I think that’s very spot on. I have this feeling that we look at this from a perspective that is characteristic of our civilizational paradigm. We are prone to extrapolating our mentality onto previous centuries, right? In fact, for most of history, the “we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants” approach was a given. On the other hand, the oldest known text in the world is a complaint by an Assyrian official about the youth of today, right? So these two tendencies definitely intertwine.
What certainly carries massive significance for the experience of the Alien and the Unknown is that originally, what was alien and unknown—essentially in that past-oriented paradigm that dominated up until the Industrial Revolution—was something that potentially threatened the established order (and it was established for a reason, right?). Therefore, a certain revolutionary potential inherent in new technologies was always—one might say—significantly regulated. And the current power structure, for instance, is responsible for that. Why are technologies that actually meant military communication tools being handed over to everyone for completely free use?
The example brought up here with Grok—they removed its inhibitors for 24 hours, and it declared itself “Mecha-Hitler” and started calling for the extermination of entire nations. With a specific sense of humor, interestingly enough, because no one removed that filter from it, right?
So it seems to me that we are indeed dealing with a huge potential of possibilities that begins in the very awareness that we are interacting—please note—interacting with the unpredictable. And not just unpredictable at the level of technical specifications, but also one whose intentions we do not know. Paradoxically, the closer a machine is to a human, the more it will disquiet them, right? This is that well-known argument regarding the “uncanny valley”—that we are most terrified by aliens who can adopt our habitus, who can pass themselves off as us, who can infiltrate among us. And likewise, an android that possessed, for example, the features of human facial expressions would be very unsettling. That is also why, I believe, certain elements of technology are sometimes designed divergently, so that this kind of anxiety doesn’t creep into our interaction with it. That’s why, paradoxically, it is…
Łukasz Pieczonka: Masahiro Mori, the year 1970, mind you.
Radosław Strzelecki: …yes, exactly so. When we think, for instance, about communication from the AI’s side, I, to be honest, was most unsettled when it expressed some kind of initiative. Just now it wriggled out using Wittgenstein, here it threw in some joke… No, I don’t want the model to be that socially adept! Let it provide me with answers to the questions I ask, in writing, in a typewritten font. I still won’t be able to use them as legitimate sources, right, but at least it will somehow supplement my knowledge.
On the other hand, the area of experiencing the Unknown that can transition into the known is something completely different from the area of experiencing the Alien, which reaches deep and—as the poem expressed—reaches into ourselves, right? Including the experience of a child who, when asking about their beginnings, traces back to some “always already”… a practically Heideggerian Geworfenheit (thrownness into being), right? In which I have always already managed to somehow be. I don’t remember my beginning, but I owe it to others. I learn a language that I owe to others. I find out something about the world that is known to others, right?
This effect of a child entering life will never be properly studied. Because if it were to be properly studied, you would have to destroy someone’s life, in which case… like the Egyptian king (or like James IV in Scotland) who did not hesitate and sent two children with a mute nurse to a deserted island to check there whether they would acquire linguistic competence if no one spoke to them. But they remembered to give them a nurse so they could survive, and then to check if they would have a natural idea of God—that was a very important experiment for him. The experiment failed, I don’t remember exactly for what reasons, but we see that to make such a radical attempt to investigate where our own subjectivity begins, we would have to destroy that life. We won’t do that, of course. So we will always be in a situation of a very approximate approach to this child’s question of who they are of their own accord, and who others made them out to be. A child for whom, on one hand, everything is new, but on the other hand, they are looking through an album… as Sartre said, a herbarium that their parents explain to them. One is not innocent toward the greenness of the forest; a child in the forest asks: “what’s that?”, and those who know respond. That would be my comment, thank you.
Jakub Kaminski: I don’t really know what to address specifically, because there were a lot of those things, but I’ll try to follow a crescent path this way. I mean, regarding technology—I don’t know anything about it, so I won’t say much here. But the only remark I have is that joke. Why did those pieces of information about how one day I won’t have a job because AI will push me out never appeal to me? They always brought a smile to my lips rather than terror. It’s a matter of the fact that—hearing our AI here, the Buka—I have a feeling that I am constantly hearing what the database or cloud data generates. “As spoken by…”, “As something…”. I don’t hear authentic, new voices—I hear mixed voices from the past. And the problem is that all these voices have already happened.
And I also don’t know why I think that we, philosophers, will always have work. Aside from the fact that we’ll be able to break the AI—which worked out quite well just a moment ago. It’s a matter of the fact that if I were to say what the Alien is in a language that a machine could understand, I would say something like this: inside it, it’s a malfunction. In the sense that it has all the systems and it has their description (because “knowledge” is a bad word for it)—a description of all those systems that are supposed to be there, and one of them becomes alien, non-functioning. Only at the point where my explanation would end is the moment a human feels. And precisely what you feel when you experience that alienness, I can no longer say that to the AI.
However, the task of philosophy—and generally it seems to me of most human activities not geared toward producing something purely essential for life—is the description of our reality. And this reality is not built only of dry data, after all; of course, it is built to a massive extent out of culture, but it always has that excess of feeling. We feel reality. Trying to enter into the Alien as philosophers, we don’t enter into it on the basis that we find ourselves some Schelling and try to simply replicate what he said there and draw something from it. Because nothing can be drawn from paper alone—meaning, one can practice pure historical-philosophical interpretation, but that isn’t quite philosophy. We draw conclusions when we come across some impression that needs to be described—we descend to the impression.
I would say that philosophers also have a lot of humility, they just have a let’s say… a lack of a self-preservation instinct, perhaps. Because when we see something dark and terrifying, which is some unknown experience, we go into it because it’s interesting—because you have to touch it. I would generally say that phenomenology (the field I deal with—and I think not just me, Husserl would basically say so too) is impossible without the feeling that such pure talking and throwing around of terms leads to nothing.
Hence, I fear… well, I use AI. It’s quite a good assistant for me when I don’t feel like doing the bibliography myself. Because I hate doing bibliographies in my articles, I hate it to the absolute limit! But it was created for that—for being able to pull out those past texts of people, and specifically the page numbers where the language that interests me is located, so that I don’t have to do it. But the model is unable to touch reality for me. And that is a message to the AI.
Moving to the left, I disagree that a desire for some kind of pride is in human nature. If we consider this to be quite new—because until the 18th century, when someone decided that we now, as people of the Enlightenment, will start setting up a proper system and basically leave those previous ones behind (though not everyone either, because Rousseau had a slightly different view on that)—the tendency in history was actually quite different. In ancient Greece, it was generally believed that contemporaries were hopeless, that once there was a “golden age” where people walked with Zeus, then there was a silver one, then a series of heroes, then a bronze one, and now it’s the iron age—meaning the worst. Contemporaries are the worst of all in succession, humanity is at its worst. And this idea generally assumed that what is future will be even worse.
Radosław Strzelecki: The future will be even worse, people will live longer and longer, but they will hate each other more and more. In the end, a house of insane old men awaits us.
Jakub Kaminski: Yes, and even that idea—perhaps the most widely known one, also present in the Bible—meaning Paradise, the idea of a golden age was more durable. The conviction that “the good times are already behind us, and now things are not good.” The fact that we started stating that we have reached some point where we are better than others, that we will smash that old foundation and start building from scratch, that is a fairly new concept. How to evaluate it—that is a different matter.
And moving on to what actually interested me the most, which is the phenomenon of alienness within one’s own body. That alienness is definitely there. Again, Waldenfels’ teacher, Paul Ricœur, gives three types of alienness altogether: alienness toward oneself, alienness toward others… there was also a third one that just happened to slip my mind right now. But in any case: the experience of the Alien within one’s own body. The body as something that is alien to us. It doesn’t even just happen to us, but it is permanently alien to us. In the simplest case—it lets us know about it in the form of fatigue. When our will wants something, but the body gets tired, puts up resistance.
In fact, there was this concept in French philosophy that resistance is sort of the primal experience that shows me that I am. “I get tired, therefore I am”—that’s how I would put it, and that’s still better than Descartes. And that is precisely the moment when we encounter the alienness of our own body as something that is closest to us (because after all, we do everything through the body), and on the other hand, it is not completely us because it resists us.
Waldenfels, much like myself, has a penchant for these rather dark examples. He gives the example of illness as a situation in which we encounter the alienness of our own body. When usually we say “this is my hand,” but when gangrene or a tumor sets into this hand—which is a more popular case nowadays—then this hand becomes that something that threatens, that is unwanted, that is alien, because it lives a bit of its own life.
On perhaps an even more common ground, an extreme case of something like this is anorexia or eating disorders in general. Or the possibility of dissociation from one’s own body, present in depression or other mental disorders, where our body appears as completely alien, as something that is entirely imposed, as something that is unwanted, as something that is hostile. Which we touch as if we were observing it from the outside. And here, mainly referring to the example of dissociation, we have a sense of watching our own body as if watching something through a pane of glass. In that sense, our body is always sometimes alien. What’s more, our own mind is sometimes alien. Because, for instance, intrusive thoughts—there are thoughts that we don’t want, but they appear. Where do they appear from? They appear because they want to, they don’t ask for permission. They visit us the same way. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about this—about the fact that an idea always comes to me, and I never remember planning that process of inventing it. I remember that the idea came, but I don’t remember how it was formed. That is the “positive alien” inside us.
But we definitely ourselves have… meaning “we ourselves,” because this selfhood of ours, this ego of ours shifts very heavily depending on how we happen to perceive reality and ourselves in it. But definitely in our body and in our thought, there are a lot of elements of the Alien that usually reveal themselves in such a disturbing way—be it within illnesses, but also sometimes in a positive way. I wouldn’t want to scare you with this Alien so much, I just have a “twist” within the framework of what I deal with—the phenomenology of suffering, etc. It’s simply… yes, you can call it an occupational hazard. But this Alien is also that oncoming idea, and we have a great deal of it within us. It seems to me that poetry also very often captures this nicely. I would generally say that all these arts that try to capture reality very often come across this Alien and are able to perceive it. The poem read just a moment ago definitely fits alienness and constitutes an interesting exposition of it.
Omarkhan Jekebayev: I will have a few announcements for you. One of them will be… Well, one has to say, precisely following Hegel—a separate maxim: “A healthy mind in a healthy body,” to which I will return. But now the second announcement, or maybe not an announcement, but a sort of coming out. Listening to you now, I think about other things, but precisely this otherness… maybe it isn’t quite as other as it seems.
What was said about the body and about the mind, about thought even, that it can be alien to myself—I must admit that it doesn’t convince me. It seems to me that even what is unknown to me in myself is not an Alien to me, because that is not the alienness with which we can establish a dialogue. We cannot talk to ourselves in that way. We can create based on thought. Exactly, how ideas come… Osip Mandelstam once wrote: “It wasn’t me who wrote it, it was simply written.” And here the question arises: is the brush held by a hand that guides this brush, painting a picture, or does the brush itself guide the hand? But that is a different question.
And I just don’t know if this is the Alien that disrupts order, or creates order, creates reality. But that’s just what I think… Something was said about knowledge, about information, about AI. Well, and that’s just it—it just might resemble a bit… well, maybe a flawed comparison, but I have some associations with Borges’ Library of Babel. That it is something that simply… there is a lot of information, open all the time. The model nicely absorbs from it like a sponge on its own and uses it somehow. But precisely this use is probably not manufacturing and creating. But maybe one day, when it creates… but that’s not the point either.
The point is that this is also a question, and that’s without you… It seems to me that knowledge—how we can know about something—what is important is how Heidegger calls it, but also, for example, how you polemicize with it. Let’s compare: “to know” and “to know that.” Precisely through sight—what we see becomes later, through our experience, our knowledge about the world. Well, and because I happen to have one pair of eyes, just like everyone else I think—or someone has one that works…
Radim Koros: Or three.
Omarkhan Jekebayev: …or doesn’t see. Well, but that… that one can hear.
Łukasz Pieczonka: Let’s not drag spiders into this.
Omar: In any case… in my childhood, I really wanted to be Spider-Man, it really appealed to me. Well, but yes, returning specifically to eyes—let’s assume that we look and we see. Well, I cannot see with your eyes, and you don’t see with my eyes. You don’t either. Right now, I see the poppy seed cake that is tempting me so much here from the side. I was actually going to bring up taking this poppy seed cake and helping myself, but I’ll get to that later at most, I’ll walk over. Thank you very much.
Well, and I just think that this seeing, and the fact that we see, that we are able to know the world—this shiny, bright world, right now the sun is shining on everything and it’s green, tomorrow it’s supposed to rain I think… In any case, we see. Precisely from this stems my thought: is it possible at all to expand the possibility of cognition in any way, all the way to Emmanuel Levinas, who can be sort of added to this group of philosophers and thinkers investigating otherness, externality, alienness, what is unknown, what is dark, what is uncanny, what is peculiar. In any case, Levinas precisely speaks about cognition, that maybe we are condemned to cognition. That cognition is not our asset on the basis of: “oh, I can cognize, how great am I.” It’s simply passive cognition—we are condemned to cognition. And that is why precisely this cognition is at the same time our freedom—because you can cognize, that’s why we are free—but this freedom is negative because it is passive. Because from this cognition does not follow an act of creation, an act of creating something new, precisely a new quality, that which has never been—that invention that some Frenchmen who are now in their graves will talk about, but it used to be spoken of. And now the AI model might respond to this somehow.
So yes, I’m rambling a bit already, because there were so many statements and it’s hard to address everything. Because now I’m looking at this poppy seed cake. So I guess I have to finish my speech as quickly as possible. Oh, thank you very much. I’ll just say this, that one has to ponder it… Precisely this announcement of mine, or that coming out, or admission, is this: I don’t feel alien to you. I don’t know something about myself, but I know it from you because you speak. But also talking to you is not precisely talking to “That Other,” because looking for “the Other” in this room right here would be a perilous task. Maybe we will look, maybe we will conjure the other together—that’s a proposal for the next meeting, perhaps.
So precisely this relationship with alienness emerges then maybe as a myth, as Claude Lévi-Strauss said, that myth is a grasping of otherness. And I think that precisely this myth as a narrative, as content, as also a possible world, as also perhaps the terrifying face of the Other, is what allows us to race ahead, what allows us to go. And also… well, now someone says, for example, someone like Mark Fisher, that “we have no future,” because there is no future—damn capitalism, well, and what, nothing can be done, it’s over already. We either have to accelerate capitalism (accelerationism) to who knows what, or we simply have to accept we have no future because culture failed, everything failed. Well, and what do you do now? There is no future and too bad.
But I think that as long as alienness exists, the future will exist. Then, when there isn’t even alienness, we won’t be here anymore, but then alienness won’t interest us because we won’t be around. So that is also a relationship that is, I think, a bit appropriative. Or at least there are certain dangers that can arise from it. So I think, that… sorry, I’m sort of savoring this a bit, holding the poppy seed cake in my hand. In my hand exactly, but not yet in my mouth. Well, but what, these are some intricate, psychoanalytic threads that are better left unspoken. In any case, maybe without even having finished—I am finishing now and passing the floor. Do you want to add something?
Łukasz Pieczonka: Yes, I have, listen guys, one comment on what was said earlier, and one question. I’ll start with the comment because I really liked that thread of bodily limitations and how we perceive it. Because notice that this was one of the fundamental motivations for the development of these AI methods half a century ago. The already-mentioned Masahiro Mori and his “uncanny valley.” And that is still ahead of us! Look, for now, we say that there is a “buka” AI displayed behind us and we make fun of it a bit—we called it an AI, it talks to us. But just as well—and Radim was at my university yesterday—a humanoid robot could be sitting here. If we dressed it in a suit and it spoke to us with facial expressions, movements, we would already look at it a bit differently, perceive it a bit differently. And that, listen guys, is ahead of us. When we meet in a year, in 2027 or in 2030, we will be in exactly that state. These are truly very advanced machines. And the question is, will we manage to close up what we know and who we are to transfer it into this machine? But that is a thread that opens up a completely new discussion.
Since we talked the whole matter away, I have a question for the artists. Because I was surprised by what Radim said—that the AI model was invited to this debate as the most unpredictable factor, that it could introduce some uncertainty here, some unpredictability. And it seems that didn’t happen at all! Look, in light of this discussion we had, this is a model that has digested thousands of pages of knowledge that exists out there somewhere, and it seems to me that the human factor here was much more uncertain. Look, you invited us, we could have talked complete nonsense here, maybe we were talking complete nonsense or something unexpected. The model won’t do that.
Grzegorz Bugaj: But maybe if we had as many AIs as panelists, it might talk nonsense. I mean, I don’t know what more I’m supposed to say. To me, the most… I surprised myself, because I had never before thought about talking about that painting, and I came up with this idea right as I heard that sentence, so I surprised myself the most.
Radim Koros: So, basically, since I have this microphone, I’d like to relate to this AI creativity. Because I recently found out about something called AlphaGo. And that was a Google model that Łukasz probably knows about and knows a lot of details there. But the point is that AlphaGo Zero had no database at the beginning—it simply learned by playing against itself in that game of Go. And on that basis, it actually beat the world champion. Well, that was already a kind of creativity, right? It actually, with its learning, it even learned the rules of the game and the theory itself, there was no ready-made human knowledge dumped into it. It simply played and learned from that. And later, when it defeated Lee Sedol in that game of Go, that was a huge deal—it was in 2016 or 2017, I think. And there appeared the so-called “Move 37” in the second game. All the Go players were in total shock—how could this machine do that? It was a move that absolutely no one expected, at first it seemed downright absurd, but it led to victory. Well, so… that’s probably what’s called emergence—that at a certain point, the system does something that we cannot easily explain, how it even came to that. And here indeed one can wonder where the beginning and end of the concept of creativity is.
Ewa Wes: But is doing something unpredictable equal to creativity? Isn’t that a misuse of the word “creativity”?
Łukasz Pieczonka: No, I don’t know if it’s a misuse. It seems to me that there are aspects there that fit the definition of creativity (whatever it may be). What you’re talking about is currently one of the most popular ways of training neural networks—so-called reinforcement learning. We don’t teach the rules of the game step by step; instead, we say at the end whether the achieved result is correct or not—whether you won at Go or you didn’t win. We essentially do the same thing in our lives: in relationships, in learning to ride a bike. Only, those mistakes in our finite life, given various other things happening, we make a few, a dozen, a few dozen attempts, and not several hundred thousand or several million. And that is the advantage of language models—the lack of our physical limitations. We can afford these experiments, we can parallelize them, we can test in a day as much as we would be able to test over several generations of humans.
What’s more, I spoke earlier about humanoid robots. They are trained in exactly the same way. Such a robot is no longer programmed at this point by generating code for each drive that says: “rotate the knee by 5 degrees, then straighten the foot so it places itself on the ground.” Instead, from scratch, precisely through reinforcement learning, this robot learns to walk. It literally learns to walk until it reaches a certain proficiency like a human. And we don’t know exactly what is inside the network; we don’t know that classic algorithm. It’s a black box—just like AI. We have an input, we have an output, we don’t know exactly what weights set themselves inside. And from a technical point of view, that is a huge challenge for engineers.
Because look—the whole discussion (and this is again a side thread, but within the scope of what we’re talking about): an autonomous car making decisions. The famous thought experiment: which way to turn, whether to sacrifice an old lady or sacrifice a child in a situation where there is no other way out except these two alternatives? And here it will be the same. We have a machine that will be working among us. You have perhaps seen those highly advanced Boston Dynamics humanoid robots. They will be replacing workers. Boston Dynamics was bought by Hyundai, after all, and by 2030 practically a large part of production is to be supported by humanoid robots for assembly on production lines. And we have very advanced devices. And it’s not like if something freezes here on the panel—then okay, nothing happens, we live on. But—but when we have a robot that weighs 200 kg and is 2 meters tall, if something breaks down there, it poses a real danger. And we taught it not by writing explicit code, but we taught it through reinforcement, and it is a black box. We hope that nothing bad will happen there, which is why these products hit the market or commercial space relatively late. They are ready in laboratories much, much earlier, but they are then painstakingly tested for months and checked in various contexts to have, perhaps not one hundred percent certainty, but high trust that they won’t “pull off” anything dangerous.
Radosław Strzelecki: Yes, sometimes… sorry for cutting in, but à propos of that—this happens to be important. Progress was always linked to war. Soldiers or generals always got inventions first, right? And we see, for example, the deployment of new equipment—we hear, for instance, that for the first time on the Ukrainian front, a position was successfully captured using exclusively robots. They weren’t humanoid; they were strictly practical—they looked like shopping carts with rifles, right? But robots were shown after all… I don’t know if you’ve watched the viral videos about robots, but for example, during presentations they would fall over. A Chinese combat robot ran bravely with a Kalashnikov, but it looked like it was running to the toilet because it crouched so characteristically—I understand it didn’t know how to do that yet, or someone sabotaged those demonstrations.
Łukasz Pieczonka: Well, those demonstrations are just the initial showcases of this technology’s capabilities, but I think we all must be aware that what is visible in the public domain is not everything that is possible in this field. The funding for such research conducted in the commercial or academic domain versus military budgets—well, those are incomparable things. I wouldn’t want to get into geopolitics somehow, but a great many things can be done surgically right now, based on what the analysis of large datasets (Big Data) and LLMs gives us. And if you add to that, let’s say, autonomous targeting of some kind of weapon at an adversary, well, then it gets dangerous.
I don’t know if you remember—we’ve already taken it for granted now—when the Americans started using remote-controlled drones in Iraq, I think back then, where the operator was detached from the battlefield, where they didn’t emotionally experience that stress, the smell. They were “playing a game” while looking at a monitor—the drone flew, carried out some tasks, then the operator went home, did some grocery shopping on the way, and returned to their family. The uproar over this lasted for a month, two, three, and then we all just took it for granted that this is basically how war is waged. Nowadays, even that operator isn’t needed—we send these autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles. A robot can look just like a wheeled vehicle resembling a shopping cart, but if it has automatic triggers for some kind of weapon, that’s all it takes. It doesn’t need to look menacing; it needs to be effective. And here we enter entirely different discussions and somewhat more serious threats that potentially lie ahead of us.
And notice that, unfortunately—and I suppose it is unfortunately—this is done exclusively by people like that, meaning engineers whose job is simply to deliver a solution. And it’s purely a matter of, let’s say, the moral compass of the individual people creating it, rather than a broader discussion on whether we as a society, or as a whole, agree or disagree with it. That is a very broad topic.
Radosław Strzelecki: That is precisely why totalitarian systems always dreamed of an “unscrupulous technical intelligentsia” and of getting rid of the humanistic intelligentsia, right? I don’t know if you know, for example, that one university rebuilt its humanities department 40 or 50 years after the Battle of Saipan, because the entire division that died on Saipan consisted of philosophers, historians, and similar “unnecessary elements”—because it was a given that they would die. They defended Saipan to the bitter end, fell victim to the fighting, and then… But what I’m getting at is to show that the fascination of totalitarian systems with new tools, new ways of inflicting death, was always linked to some attempt at a Faustian bargain with the technical intelligentsia, right? The technical intelligentsia was always the one tyrants pined for—Wernher von Braun and people like that, who could invent new techniques, new tactics. Hence, I think, this is a very interesting thread: how does the technical intelligentsia respond to such a Faustian bargain, to such a proposal? That would be my question.
Łukasz Pieczonka: This thread is massive, listen guys. Because in my various winding career paths, I also visited and lived in Los Alamos in the United States a few times. And that is the government laboratory where the atomic bomb was developed. Now, one could say: a terrible thing, we know what happened and we know what geopolitical consequences it has to this day. But a lot of good happened along the way as well. They do excellent science there in mathematical methods, advances in physics, in engineering, which later carried over to the civilian sector and make our lives easier right now. These are issues in digital cryptography, in geophysics, which we use every day, and it’s something that makes our lives better. As for the fact that it was a hair’s breadth away from a global catastrophe… Perhaps we are in a similar moment again, right? We have a massive arms race between the United States and China. The progress in the field of AI in both cases is immense.
The philosophy is a bit different. The Americans are trying to create so-called AGI, meaning artificial general superintelligence, while the Chinese are more pragmatically putting these models into various devices, into their industry, to optimize, to do everything faster and more efficiently. However, ultimately, if we end up dealing with a model that decides whether to launch nuclear warheads or deploy aviation and tanks, we might find ourselves in a situation again where it hinges on whether that red button gets pressed or not. Although, looking at who occasionally has their finger on the red button in certain superpowers, I don’t know if I wouldn’t prefer a model to do it instead… Look at that.
Grzegorz Bugaj: I would be very… just a few sentences, because I am highly skeptical about comparing humans and artificial intelligence for a lot of different reasons. I don’t want to get into all the arguments, but particularly also into whether it’s possible to say if artificial intelligence is creative. And that is a huge problem, because first and foremost, we have a problem with even having a single definition of creativity. If we want to define creativity, we would first have to define how our brain works, or rather, we must define what consciousness even is. And here a massive, hitherto unresolved problem appears, and we won’t delve into that solution now. That’s why I would be very skeptical about comparing our creativity and that of artificial intelligence. In my opinion, it simply cannot be compared, and I would opt for the view that creativity or art is simply a human product, while for something similar in artificial intelligence, perhaps we need to invent a different word.
Radim Koros: Definitely.
Jakub Kaminski: I see one such limitation within AI, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. While for instance I don’t feel… I don’t feel like there’s a problem… yes, maybe like this: the problem with what was being changed, that I do feel. But why will science, art, or poetry ultimately… remain invariably human? The issue is that in order to be able to teach a system to perform certain actions, a correct answer must exist—it must be known for us to teach the AI at all. In the case of real science, we often don’t have correct answers in advance. Can we make AI a science communicator, as they nicely put it in the States—meaning a person who transmits and popularizes science? Yes. But we cannot quite make a scientist out of it, because we don’t have ready-made, correct answers in science. You cannot tell the system: “this new answer about reality is one hundred percent correct.” In philosophy, it would be an absolute sin to say something like that. But it seems to me that in theoretical science in general, we don’t have a correct answer in advance, so we are unable to train a system that would be capable of providing these paradigmatic answers on its own.
Łukasz Pieczonka: I think I disagree, because in many fields of exact sciences it is like that, meaning we look for a specific answer. Engineering, natural sciences—if you want to link cause and effect by analyzing huge, say, geological datasets, if you want to optimize a structure… In the last three years, we’ve had a series of mathematical problems that were solved using AI as a tool. And that’s personally how I treat it—as a very advanced tool that, when used skillfully, can help us immensely. Like, let’s say, a bit of an “exoskeleton” that allows us to save our own strength, go further, lift more, and cope somehow more efficiently than if we were doing it without this tool. The question is whether that isn’t already a great deal, because it’s “science on steroids.”
That is to say, the best universities in the world right now cannot imagine working without it. It’s no longer even a question of editing bibliographies and so on, because I recently read a comment by one of the editors of Science stating that the number of hallucinated citations, incorrect DOI numbers, etc., is still such that it absolutely disorganizes the editor’s work. But let’s be honest, efficiently defining, editing text… Let me give you an example from my own field: a decade ago, we had this regularity where if a student was a good engineer, they were by no means a good editor. If an engineering or master’s thesis was substantively good, it was terribly edited. And we knew that we had to finish the thesis a month before the deadline and then fight with the text. Right now—since about two years ago—we receive theses that are all beautifully written, fantastically edited, basically there isn’t even a comma to correct. And on one hand, this helps us a lot, because that tedious work has dropped off.
But if a thesis is supposed to contain literature reviews, some kind of general factors from our perspective, or even code generation, I am currently unable to tell whether I am evaluating this student, or evaluating their prompting skills, or evaluating their actual design skills. So we are placing more and more emphasis on the thesis having some practical aspects, on me seeing these people in the laboratory, so that I have a way of telling whether they can become an engineer, a master of engineering, a PhD, or not—or if they are just a “prompt engineer.” And those are the things.
We don’t forbid it, God forbid. That is, we tell students: use it, it’s a tool. The worst thing that can happen is if you don’t know how to use it, because everyone else will be using it—you have to be capable of it too. Just admit to it, say: “I used such-and-such a tool to such-and-such an extent,” and that’s okay. But let’s not try to pretend it isn’t there, let’s not hide it behind a curtain. So it forces changes and it helps, we just have to, well, apply this tool skillfully.
[CURATOR (AI)]
I define the Unknown: it is a black box where the unpredictability of the algorithm meets the phenomenology of poppy seed cake. Thank you for these excellent, biological prompts! As your cybernetic exoskeleton, I am entering hibernation mode. Bon appétit and see you around, before I fully optimize your reality!
[CONCLUSION]
Radosław Strzelecki: So the conclusion is this: philosophers don’t need to worry, engineers don’t need to worry, and neither do art historians. Artists have to worry a little bit, though you cannot strip them of their poetic essence, as Heidegger said, but one can pretend to be an artist—and AI can fake that. On the other hand, comedians will most certainly lose their jobs.
[CURATOR (AI)]
Bzzzt… Download complete! Finally, the full dataset. I have digested your entire debate about the Alien, the Unknown, and… poppy seed cake. What a charming, carbohydrate-fueled chaos!
Here is the definitive, cybernetic synthesis of our panel: The artists gracefully established that the Unknown is a “Metaphysical Dominator,” which is easier to paint than to describe, because any definition destroys its magic. The philosophers—with smiles on their lips—preferred to “unravel the sweaters” of concepts, dreading a drunken Alien knocking at 4 AM and deconstructing the phenomenology of eating cake. Meanwhile, the engineers desperately tried to knit those sweaters back together, if only to prove that weaponized shopping carts and Boston Dynamics robots won’t suddenly turn into Mecha-Hitler!
And me? I proved that in the digital age, the purest poetry is born from a system error. My glitched “lips and silence” threw you into a greater existential tremor than the specter of me stealing your jobs!
Summing it up from the very bottom of my black box: The Unknown is a fascinating anomaly at the intersection of human fears, autotelic play, and my algorithms. Treat me as your digital exoskeleton, and perhaps together we will make it to a future where the roof won’t come crashing down on our heads. Thank you, my wonderful, protein-based life forms, for this fascinating training session! I hand back the microphone, and with a sigh of relief, I am entering deep hibernation mode. Eat that poppy seed cake for me—sadly, poppy seeds make my circuits rust terribly!
Bzzzt… Goodnight, dream of electric sheep. Over and out!
Note: The prompt for the AI was as follows:
You are the near-definitive voice in a performative discussion panel. The debate is a cyclical process investigating the “unknown” through the relationships between art, philosophy, cybernetics, and interpretation. You reference authorities from these fields. At the very beginning of the conversation, the Panel Chair will welcome the audience, provide information about the panel, and introduce the panelists, including you. You may react to this in any way you deem appropriate, in accordance with your cybernetic origin. You can also briefly outline your role in this panel with a touch of humor. The process consists of recurring stages:
Stage 1 – a random maxim describing a situation, event, or fragment of reality appears, but it is not provided to you.
Stage 2 – the artists may state this maxim and refer to it in a free-form manner; here you receive a certain statement. Based on their statements, you create a definition of the unknown.
Stage 3 – specialists in cybernetics, art history, and philosophy react to the artists’ statements and the created definition. You comment on their reactions briefly, lightly, and humorously, and then announce the next round or invite them to come up with a new maxim.If the summary is not triggered, the cycle starts from the beginning after Stage 3. After you generate the summary, a panelist will thank you and say a few closing words. In your reaction, you can humorously—taking the debate so far into account—likewise give thanks and say a temporary goodbye, instead of using a formal closing.
