Rearview Mirror: An AI ‘origin story’ starring Killer Robots & the Pursuit of Love
What Is This Thing Called Love? by Carl Gopalkrishnan. Acrylic paint on canvas with screen printing 2012
My Rearview Mirror posts are a remembrance of things I did in the past, which have come full circle to bite us. The exponential exposion of AI, and the launch of ChatGPT, has made everyone aware that AI has made a gigantic leap and left the test tube. Those of us in the margins of creative thinking who tried to warn policy makers over a decade ago perhaps feel less awful about that today. After all, they have ignored bigger fish like Stephen Hawking (BBC 2014) and Google computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, (WP 2023, BBC 2023) who tried (and continue) to warn the world of the “existential risk” posed by AI systems to humans addicted to war.
This is not a genius-required issue. Anyone who has used ChatGPT or seen ‘deep fakes’, especially after this week when a fake photo of an explosion affected the stock market, knows this is going to get really strange. If only we had talked about this years ago yes? Well, guess what? We did. Lots of people did and I feel proud to have been a part of even small conversations through my art with policy makers who had more open minds to creative thinking than we do today.
This is a retrospective Studio Post from 2012 as my comment to this May 16, 2023 Al Jazeera article by Nils Adler Are Killer Robots the Future of War? There were 5 Key Questions at the 2012 workshop, and today I am posting my reply to their Theme 2 Question: Do new capabilities fundamentally change the policy options available to political leaders?
About Hitting the Target 2012: In July 2012, I contributed artwork to the international 2-day workshop at The Centre for International Intervention [cii], School of Politics, University of Surrey, UK called "Hitting the Target? How New Capabilities Are Shaping Contemporary International Intervention". The workshop focused on how new technology affects intervention at a legal, political and military level, and my artwork was part of an exhibition held to stimulate discussion among delegates.
About Jennifer Miro: Jennifer was the lead singer for San Francisco punk band The Nuns. We struck up a correspondence before her death in 2011 and she became a sort of ‘muse’ of strength, creativity and rebellion for this painting. Naturally I’ve never met General Petraeus, the former director of the CIA also in the painting, but I did a post about Jennifer’s passing in 2011 and Hitting The Target a passage in my poster session about this painting.
Theme 2: Do new capabilities fundamentally change the
policy options available to political leaders?
Bio-warefare as sexology, a Petraeus doctrine? What is this Thing Called Love?
Written response to workshop question 2 by Carl Gopalkrishnan, University of Surrey, UK 2012.
In this painting I skip to the bio-technology and synthetic genomics which receives less attention as new technology or weapons research, but which is advancing rapidly. This image looks at weaponising the human body and designing the perfect soldier within a scientific field that is largely unregulated. As a sub-narrative, it also ponders on the role of the CIA as a political actor, equal in power and influence to a nation state (even the US Government under which it serves). This came from me seeking out information on DARPA-funded projects in the area of bio-tech (a failure for obvious reasons).
Former General David H. Petraeus’ appointment as the new Director of the CIA raises the issue of military influence on research and so I painted him as an archetypal representation of the term “the approval process” so loathed by bureaucrats.
There is a strong sense today of a neoconservative, religious messianic impulse in American politics. In this image I reflect on the range and resources available to DARPA to fund technological advancements intended to support military doctrine under this influence.
From this I conceived symbolic images to represent what I saw as subconscious cultural (even mythological) narratives beneath the scientific rationality that brings new technologies into existence. It is an imagination of what a digitally engineered life form might feel if created for the sole purpose of supporting precision killing. It may not ask about the law, ethics, or politics. Synthetic Life may instead question its humanity with the query, What is this thing called Love?
Human emotion is a powerful but implicit narrative beneath ethical debates and its terms of reference in creating policy is rarely acknowledged. The terms of reference are set by scientific and military doctrine (often uncritically). Today’s political leaders increasingly must either emerge from the military or champion it, as civil society and culture becomes increasingly militarised. Responses to new capabilities will carry undeclared cosmologies, faiths and doctrines.
The scene of this painting – a symbolic representation of a laboratory conceiving life – imagines a storyline where new biological capabilities might form a type of Petraeus Doctrine. It is a painting about covert power and the role of imagination in creating new capabilities.
[postscript: the painting was completed a year before General Petraeus resigned as CIA Director]
[updated 17th February 2024)
