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With the advent of 21st Century Studies, what we might call peril@posthumanities dislodges risk as a concern of the “human being” and shifts it to what has always been at the heart of the anthropocentric machine: rather than a ubiquitous “vestigium hominis video!” (I see the trace of a man!), the specter of the inhuman or non-human recurrently emanates from each new conception of the human. Although, for instance, Aristotle’s De Anima might secure zoon logon ekhon—the (animal) being held by speech (logos)—a place in the realm of animate beings, logos itself is peculiarly inanimate and technical. 20th century artificial intelligence, computer technology, and the Turing test (or its pulp-fictional equivalent—the Voight-Kampff test) indicate that non-living machines (automaton logon ekhon?) can embody and perform that which is preeminently human. The discourse on computational emergence suggests that computational interactions can have a certain “life of their own” and can create formations that are independent from their original programming. Both informatic and biological networks have material substrates that are non-symbolic, i.e. not dealing in signs and representations, and hence are subject to chance, the aleatory, and the clinamenic swerving that belong not only to living beings but to all matter. Despite the fact that with Risk the possible threat of ruin and the possible smile of fortune fall upon both the animate and inanimate alike (as does the sun rise on the good and bad, and the rain drop upon the just and unjust), we have a tendency to understand Risk only in human terms. Although we might extend the reach of risk into the animal kingdom or the biosphere at large, we tend not to pose the question of risk in relation to the inanimate or machinal, yet we nevertheless engage the question of risk in relation to non-living and inanimate forms by way of experimental art, experimental music, experimental literature, and so on. The point here is not to institute a new ontology or new poetics of risk, but to ask the question concerning risk apart from the life and death of the living being and the natural world at large: in short, we will ask the question concerning risk in relation to techne rather than physis. The anthropocentric and zoocentric conception of risk presumes that risk concerns the world of the animate—whether world-building Dasein or poor-in-world animality—but not that which is entirely without world, the inanimate stone, for instance. Yet if risk is such a legible feature of the worlds of stock market, finance, and Vegas gaming table—all of which manifest the algorithmic, calculable, and mechanical dimensions of risk—it might not be so peculiar to turn to our non-human and inhuman automata and ask, then, about risk in relation to robots and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) or artificial life (AL). AI, AL, robotics, mechatronics, biotechnology, biocomputing, biomedia, transgenic bioart, genetic architecture, and other emergent modes of technological morphogenesis inhabit a Between-World in which “we” today must pose the question of risk. |
