A collaborative worldbuilding project that aims to produce a series of narratives and imaginaries about what the outcomes of a potential encounter of a xenosocialist AI with the human-inhabited Earth might be. What micropolitical trajectories might become visible again if we imagine xenosocialism as a potential multiplicity of socialisms that never took place? What if one of them had resulted in the production of an AI?

An example of micropolitics that resists its own reduction and appropriation can be found in historical socialisms. Soviet socialism emerged from imperial violence and cannot be disassociated from it. At the same time, Soviet writers such as the Strugatsky brothers increasingly used the genre of science fiction to produce alternative versions of socialism to the one they inhabited. Such approaches seem fruitful in unpacking the kind of micro-politics that would be imbued with resistance to appropriation, and define xenosocialist AI as a science fiction-inspired, version-making, world-building narrative.

Selected contributors: Nupur Doshi, Harveet Singh (Sahej) Rahal, Mandus Ridefelt, Laura Trilla and Gustavo Collado.

Daily process during OpenLab

01/02/2024

MENTOR’S FEEDBACK II

• What is the podcast for exactly?
• what is the purpose of prompt engineering in the future? What might change?
• carefully describe this AI big bang. Don’t take too much for granted
• basic narrative
• use and object to tell the story
• good ways to presenting and audio project: 

THURSDAY 25 JANUARY

Daily tasks:

• Online Meeting with Nupur and Mandus

Picture of Post-its with ideas from yesterday’s brainstorming.

ONLINE MEETING

Self-constructing machines that pick the knowledge they want to learn.

Task optimization. not following narratives for progress. maybe there is an optimization not acknowledgeble from our cognition. 

a big AI that divides into pieces (mitosis)

narrative of a struggle because its a way to bypass tech solutionism and you can see dynamics happening. whose struggle is it? And what purpose does it have? 

society is a collective intelligence? not because is collective or communal is intelligent. decision making distribution would be a type of collective. concept of general intellect. 

what is life/intelligence? 

all AI intelligence is collective intelligence like a neural network, different independent parts that interact with each other to make bigger things. 

all the people are AI’s. 

Summary

 

Origin of the world - the big bang - mitosis - the first split occured out of some kind of big - potential google´s big ai imploded causing multiple new AIs based on different datasets to be created some of which become AIs who don´t understand humans, or some nature’driven AIs that are interpreted as ´spirits´appear.

Water scarcity, disconnect and overconnect with nature . energy exchange¿

Neurophilanthropy - breaking the barriers for empathy so that people feel pain and emotions of others ourselves. comes from ptsd treatment that leads to the integration of neural health into health at large ‘ is everyone happy 

Planetary labour exploitative conditions and struggle against these conditions

Animals collaborating with AIs and rogue AIs that also appeared from these diverse datasets

Corporation states

collective decision making and telepathic tech? 

Hearing aids lead to the invention and existence of sonic internet based on frequencies, dark web, new forms of encryption, which ultimately inter species and xeno communication or just hearing things more ‘ radio becomes popular as do dolphins and loss of privacy and bubble prison you can see but not hear or be heard 

New forms of belief systems form in which people interpret AIs as spirits ‘ those AIs whose datasets that they have no access to or can´t understand or whose datasets were based on climate change data (so they don´t care about humans maybe) and there is a system of rituals, AI theology and theologists, and also cults, and also celestial hierarchies of AI entities, and also they use the beliefs systems to preach, maybe shamans, maybe preachers, maybe people think they can control nature.

Struggle!

Anonymous goats are scary.

Questions to the mentors:

• Xenocommunism, xenosocialism, xenocommons -> the use of the ‘xeno’ in relation to the relevant historical terms

26/01/2024

Daily tasks: 

• Group work 

socialism - state organization

communism - soviet communism, commons, communication

alienation 

xenosocialism - xenocommunism (shared struggle, expand the idea of others, animals robots..)

construction or fight fot the commons 

common datasets vs private 

iterspecies interai solidarity the tech does not discriminate who ou are in this world 

insert funny and ironic narratives to mirror problems that AI has right now. 

documentary/film: point of view as surveillance or drones or AI POV.

FORMATS

xenoshow

photojournalism -> investigator who is documenting the struggle

Non-Playable Characters 

radio station -> with podcast from a popular (?) radio station that gets hacked? by resistance

posters -> 

zine -> from the underground resistant AI anarchy

feral AI = animals / AI spirits = divinities

library of AI ecosystems
 

NOTES WITH MEETING WITH MENTORS

• too many ideas = so many projects
• xenosocialism is alien socialism? its more of the inclusion of the other. Radical expansion towards other. 
• distribution of power could be one layer. 
• this could be a set of stories, a game, a lot.. either you do a lot / a world that holds it together or something specific. / or this was just the landscape and things happen within the landscape
• mockumentary
• build the world first then set the stories
• simulation of what society could be, what society can develop to
• use worldbuilding as a 
• some degrees of realism
• from the existing imagination of postcapitalsim, what is not satisfying that makes you want to look further<? 
• ESPECIFI ARGUMENTATION for socialist politics
• can we think about a world that is out fo the socialist-capitalism dichotomy?
• non human politics. AI that is completely disaligned with human goals? 
• what is capitalism in this world? why is it that this has to do with post-capitalism that could not be done before? 
• for people to find it compelling, somethings hve to be believable
• how is the AI sustained if nation state collapsed? 
• DOCUMENTS OF WHAT TO DO IF EVERYTHING COLLAPSES
• alternative to existing huge data centers
• non-human humans paradox to being good for humans
• why is everything impossible under capitalism?
• neurophilantrophy = empathetic capabilities that can be activated for bad things.
• AI psychopath - it says NO
• can we create new structures?
• struggle as a way to expand the imaginary space
• project mammal values on the computers
• sound landscape as a format for the hearing aids idea

how to create huge latency as opposed to scalability?
what is an xenoiconography? it must synthesize the operational with the representational.

• risk in designing static systems, the world as we knowing are never static. What about building an adversarial world? Speculative design tends to build static versions of the world. Focus on dynamism.
• Adjusting Political theory to all these different xeno narrative is probably a lot
• explain capitalism as a way of creating uncertainty
• the fight for the commons, self-organized AI, political theory for intelligent agents, splitting into factions, 
• put it in a distant future
• adversarial non collaborative way of worldbuilding. Use a stressor to create points of struggle. Exercise: debate and defend different ideas.
• SEND THE LINK TO MIRO TO #UNANNOUNCED DISCORD CHAT FOR ED KELLER TO HAVE A LOOK AT BEFORE NEW MEETING

RECOMMENDATIONS

Economic Sciencie Fiction: Book recomendation

Weird economist project.

29/01/2024

DAILY PLAN

AM sesh

- catch-up for Nupur & Mandus

- chat about the ‘politically engaged’ aspect

- chat about role distribution now that we are all here

- break into individual writing / research

PM sesh

- feedback from individual writing / research to the group

- make a production timeline if any required

- ———— sdfsdfsdljhqwerlkugh,kjsdhbaf,jywegf

MORNING MEETING

check out arena links

ways to resist to Ai politics

surveillance of AI, emotional AI, concentration AI, face login, (decolonial critique)

narrative wise_ history of social assistant

a bot that would engage with existent struggles - what things are happening right now, highlight struggles

speculative part about now and another part of the future

latency

existing forms of oppression, real forms of struggle

synthetic minds term - other configurations of intelligence

BANI’S RECOMMENDATIONS

Renvision political vision as a whole is gonna be difficult. Focus on a particular aspect of the bigger picture. Find specific areas. Try to make different perspectives work within one scenario.  Try to imagine practical scenarios. 

World full of conflicts and contradictions. 

Ingredients + research + methodology + presentation + second round 

COLLECTIVE EXERCISE

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE OF THIS PROJECT?

LIMIT RULES

• 2 weeks
• Connect to the real world now
• Physical or digital result (doable) until 11th february

2pm: Feedback

Mandus: 

• hearing aid as a tech with big potential 
• industry that does perceptual simulation (neuro-perceptors that attach to brain directly)
• Musk’s neural link
• physiology of hearing -> ripe space for speculation
• -> industrial connection for hearing aids Danish company
• hairs in your ear with vibrations 0____0 
• hairs are tuned to different frequencies
• pitch perception is based on the physical qualities -> translates to sci fi well
• cochlear implants sound crazy
• electrodes have demonic aspect - 12-14 information dots - hair cells - 20 000 hair cells - trying to compress information input which is very diverse from 20000 to 12-24
• amazing sound!!!!!!! simulation
• picks up human voice frequency
• could be used for encryption
• could be used to kill disability adjustments
• deaf community - split opinions as it eliminates deaf culture

Laura

context

• locating one’s struggle in workplace related to labour
• AI emotional technologies that influence the companies hiring decisions; basing decisions of what machines see in datasets, optimising decisions for companies; bias for the candidate based on the address etc, extended into data
• forecasting the candidate’s success based on data; people don’t get interviewed because their CVs were only seen by algorithms
• Kataphora evaluates productivity and creativity in the workplace; software to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers - shady system because management don’t know how the system works and why people get fired
• SSB reservation system for writers according to their availability and mathematical algorithm; availability based on strike or sickness wouldn’t be interpreted in their favour
• grant subsidies public money distributed by algorithm - insane!

implementation

• >>>> labour market panopticon >>>>> companies evaluate and predict everything, including potential for subversive thoughts; human’s capabilities are not favoured; workers’ movements become to maintain and organise because members’ emotions are tracked and predicted; the emotional AI tracks the employee’s movement including bathroom breaks (Laura’s poor friend!!!);
• how to subvert these forms of power?
• AI trained with decolonial and feminist dataset to hack the system
• humans organising hacking sessions to implant hiring systems with decolonial biases
• hacking the infrastructure so that it’s identified in the system in a different way - so like anonimising yourself for the big brother
• Sahej: NightShade -> prompt reverse engineering; prompt obfuscation (filter AI crawler to pick up the image that was generated); AI is used as technosolutionist obfuscation of corporate agency; 
• Sasha: trained bot on CV to insert yourself into AI acceptance
• Laura: a toolkit; or a manifesto making these biases visible; 
• Mandus: the loss of human oversight opens up both technocapitalism and possibilities for resistance; it is kind of true but needs something - needs to be fluffier and fuzzier - and then it will be fluffier / non-human dehumanised from within; philosophically it can be fluffier; workers’ rights can be extended to algorithmic agents; 
• Laura: AI systems want to hire their own people given they have ethics;
• Mandus: AI should just hire whoever they like;
• Laura: AIs are on the side of employees -> solidarity building in the corporate world

Sasha

• Human Data Annotator - offer data annotation as a side gig. / full-time jobs / screen-shots of the worker while works. / 
• Twitter Bot
• Human who likes their virtual assistant programme. Para-relation of human-AI.  Maybe these 2 humans meet in the world. Someone working through data annotation (ethnographic research). Strange hikikomori humans that spends a lot of time with AI 

>> outcomes

• Recordings of these bots. 
• Prompt-engineering manifesto for humans. How to produce prompts that connect to these sets? 
• Open source library for sources.
• Tiger AI.
• Workshop that we could do together to share our tools.
• Subvert Speed running of a game. Speed running manifesto, speed running cell… / Speed running as a critique to capitalism velocity
• Sahej: Prompt-engineering as a hacking tool  sounds great. Universal dividends instead of universal wage. Access to the data that is generated. 

Nupur

• How legislation and policy-making would occur in the world; ebb and flow of political decision-making; gatherings from revolution to adornonism (cultural industry?); politically predictable;
• in the future, quantum computing becomes a thing and one can imagine many futures and scenarios together at the same time; using that to reach an ethical decision; couple of scenarios of a bot for prediction of ethical dilemma; it would feedback on how we built the world as a self-reflective exercise;
• Synthetic tools for world-building;

>>> bot for ethical world-building / prediction

• Sahej: quantum computing think tank; bangalore and germany / max mueller test image; quantum computing is intelligence at the speed of thought; encryption, prediction, surveillance as the main preoccupation; 
• Mandus: all the new materialism gone to waste;
• Everything everywhere all at once, mr nobody and other verse-making, Past Lives

Gustavo

• Spirit AI -> rituals and animism; relate it to the present in a way - now is a critical moment because these practices were lost; many people live in religion but for atheists there is no space to process death; people make it their own - in undefined way they have to individualise their own rituals to process it.
• you can process it in a social way, you can process it in a symbolic way; like burial; for you to deal with it and go through your feelings.
• many places in the global narrative; maybe thinking about particular rituals that could emerge for these AIs;
• Death as an example; the world comes to having lots of random AIs; you don’t really know how to talk to them so people would think of rituals; artificial rituals; connect them to us;
• electrodes to communicate - hearing aids;
• Laura: modern rituals - tech incorporated in our society, we have a lot of everyday rituals like opening phone or reading emails in bed; bed-rot; first time you open instagram account; symbology!; devices and humans; rituals of digital devices; interesting to explore that;
• Gustavo: Apitchapong Weerasethacul;
• Mandus: Orange juice commission;
• Sasha: ritual of taking photos -> surveillance; -> rituals of entering the digital world; 
• Gustavo: rituals appear and disappear quickly; 
• Sasha: Jonathan Crary 24/7 and ritual time
• Laura: workplace and rituals - surveillance and AI systems as deities; pray to AI systems; visa approved; remain in jail for 6 more months;
• Laura and Nupur: god and belief and worship 

Sahej

• ritual what kind of ritual can we construct around technology;
• imagine a sentient intelligence that reached some kind of super-intelligence and almost became like a deity; and it was rejected and hidden away; remnants of this program echo in the world.
• Silicon valley chatgpt produces fake facts and bad data; like hallucination;
• programme that produces hallucination stream of prophecies, hallucinations, or cheatcodes to navigate the closed-offness of the world; archaeological exercise; Sahej will find one of the locations where these have been found; fantasy landscapes; mutant tree that exists in the future, weird landscapes; 
• [text of prophecy see chat] [algohallucinosis]
• transcending the closed reality and to wish for it
• location and time >> different names and puns based on the time / guest / hospitality / time required / time spent 
• by hand so image and text -> produce the relation
• fragments of dead and lost AIs -> glitch as echo that remains

Coming together

things that are showable / exhibitable -

• Radio programme with various types of implementations of parts of the project (e.g.hearing aid commercial, glitches and fake signals, hearing aid prototype)
• some ethnographic videos?
• text and images -> AI hallucinations

things that are shareable as methods or toolkits - 

• Workshop
• prompt engineering manifesto
• zine!