Frederik Stjernfelt

This book discusses, from various angles, the new trends in Artificial intelligence (AI), given the current so-called golden period that this field is undergoing. Recent progress in machine learning applications, such as image recognition and natural language processing, have raised the level of optimism that one day an AI can exhibit genuine intelligence. In games like Go and chess, human players have been surpassed by computers. As during earlier periods of AI optimism, there is increasing talk about domain-general artificial intelligence being possible. But just how intelligent are current AI systems, and what can we expect in the future? What will a world with an increasingly important role for AI systems be like? Which shifts with regard to the concept of intelligence as well as the societal order do these developments have? Authors with different views on the present and future of AI research and the role of AI in society discuss these questions, illustrating the diversity of discussions on AI and the many ways our lives are influenced by it.

Whereas the classical sciences were organized around academic disciplines, knowledge production today is increasingly interdisciplinary and distributed across a variety of societal sectors. Classical disciplines have not only specialized and multiplied; they are increasingly interacting with extra-academic fields and supplemented by new transdisciplinary methods focusing on solving grand societal challenges, such as globalisation, multiculturalism, equality, democracy, security and health. Given the nature of these challenges and the ways in which university leadership has been organised, the very notion of liberal arts and humanities within Western research universities is undergoing profound transformations. This book addresses the signatures of the transformative process in the humanities and the organisation of disciplinary knowledge. Based on multidimensional methodologies for mapping knowledge diversity, the volume outlines reasons for optimism on the potentials of the current hybrid university system. Drawing on a number of case studies and conceptual-empirical mappings of the humanities in Denmark and beyond, and avoiding simple metrics, the volume opens for an appreciation of different types of impact and styles of reasoning, both in classical and interdisciplinary fields of the humanities. From this perspective, a more composite picture of human culture, language and history can emerge from humanities research. It goes beyond the picture of rational agents, and situates human interaction in more complex landscapes of collective identities, networks, and constraints that open for new forms of intellectual leadership in the 21st century.

Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process based on semiosis, or sign action. An aim of the biosemiotic approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties of forms of communication and signification (including cellular adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We introduce the concept of semiotic threshold zone and analyze the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the basic concepts for theoretical biology.

The vitalism/reductionism debate in the life sciences shows that the idea of emergence as something principally unexplainable will often be falsified by the development of science. Nevertheless, the concept of emergence keeps reappearing in various sciences, and cannot easily be dispensed with in an evolutionary world-view. We argue that what is needed is an ontological nonreductionist theory of levels of reality which includes a concept of emergence, and which can support an evolutionary account of the origin of levels. Classical explication of emergence as “the creation of new properties” is discussed critically, and specific distinctions between various kinds of emergence are introduced for the purpose of developing an ontology of levels, framed in a materialistic and evolutionary perspective. A concept of the relation between levels as being inclusive is suggested, permitting the “local” existence of different ontologies. We identify, as a working hypothesis, four primary levels and explicate their nonhomomorphic interlevel relations. Explainability of emergence in relation to determinism and predictability is considered. Recent research in self-organizing non-linear dynamical systems represents a revival of the scientific study of emergence, and we argue that these recent developments can be seen as a step toward a final “devitalisation” of emergence.

We cannot, however, rely on government-imposed regulation to solve all the problems of the Internet. Regulation can and should set a better framework than what is currently the case, but by nature all regulation is general and framework-setting only, and nobody can expect it to solve all problems in detail. Malignant forces of many different kinds will continue to bypass, exploit and challenge even the best regulation. Therefore, actors within the public sphere and civil society must contribute to the preservation of freedom of expression on the Internet. The simplistic view of a dichotomy between state and private often seems to assume that society consists only of a number of companies and private individuals on the one hand, and on the other, a state. From that plain dichotomy, it follows that policy must then be determined by an ongoing arm-wrestle between the two. Such a polarized setup might give a rough picture of authoritarian societies. But painting the two in this oppositional way completely ignores the key role of civil society and the public sphere in modern democracies—in between the government sphere and the private sphere, so to speak. In this context, traditional media ought to adopt a leading role. It is well known that such media outlets are under pressure by tech giants, primarily because the crucial advertising income is migrating towards the tech giants and their attention economy. Print newspapers are shrinking, and people go online to find news. In this story of decay, many have been a bit too willing to see an overlapping shift, where new technology and new players replace old and outdated ones, just like cars replaced horse-drawn carriages and the drive-thru replaced roadside inns. This widely-held idea overlooks one fundamental fact: to a very large extent, the news content that people look for and find on the tech giants’ platforms is still largely produced by the old pre-Internet media outlets, newspapers, TV-networks, publishing companies, film production companies, etc. Tech giants have indeed become great marketers of news and content, but they themselves do not produce the content they deliver. This is one of the reasons that the categorization of the giants as media is wrong. Newspapers, media outlets and publishers embody free debate and Enlightenment principles in civil society—supplemented by public-private players such as universities and other research institutions, think tanks and philanthropic foundations. Here it is crucial that such media and institutions hold on to the elementary principles of free speech and do not resort to introducing community standards. Moreover, they must keep promoting freedom, which includes also points of view considered unpopular, provocative or grotesque by the ideas of the moment and the mainstream. One man’s “hate speech” is another man’s truth may not apply to every single case but should still count as a guiding motto.

As early as the 1990s, there were critical voices with a skeptical and even gloomy view of the beneficial effects of the Internet. Cultural critic and media theorist Neil Postman was generally skeptical towards technological solutions to political problems. He understood technology through Goethe’s classical metaphor of the Faustian pact with the Devil. He believed the Internet would only add to the information congestion that he already saw as one of the most important issues of modern society, and which makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish important from unimportant information. In hindsight, it is obvious that critics like Postman developed a highly limited and erroneous view on the possibilities of the Internet: “To put it plainly, I think the Internet is something like power steering or cruise control in cars. I mean, not that it’s not useful, but once you invent the basic car, you’ve got it. Now these things are useful, and the automobile companies add them on to the cars and then they convince consumers that they absolutely have to have them. I’m not saying that they’re completely useless—of course, they’re not. But the Internet doesn’t help us address the problems that we need to address.” Postman went as far as to dismiss the entire computer and Internet revolution as a mere diversion from the real problems of society. “The Internet and computer technology are just distractions.” He basically considered it a new form of commercial entertainment technology with very limited utility; cf. his famous diagnosis: “We’re amusing ourselves to death.” It is obvious that this kind of neo-Luddism completely missed its target and did not acknowledge the Internet’s already then burgeoning potential for education, dissemination of information, intellectual empowerment and cooperation.

On September 11, 2001, Internet users searched Google for information on the unfathomable events taking place in Manhattan. But the search “New York Twin Towers” came up with no hits. A full month had passed since the words “twin towers” had last been indexed. This meant that at this crucial moment, the term as a search object had not been updated. All the search results Google came up with were frustratingly irrelevant for the acute needs of the users. As an emergency solution, Google created a breaking news page featuring “News and Information on the US Attacks”, which was placed on top of the search list. The page featured links to the websites of news outlets and other news organizations as well as useful links to aid organizations, emergency aid, phone numbers of airlines and hospitals. This episode made Google, during the following year, develop a news filter as part of its search algorithm. This meant that current headlines now came up on top of the search list when a user entered the relevant search words.

In 1964, media theorist Marshall McLuhan noted: “The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology.” Today, this problem is even more urgent with the rapid development of digital media. We are witnessing a radical shift of paradigms. For a long time, we have been blind to the consequences of digital intoxication. We have turned a blind eye to the fact that we are being reprogrammed by the new digital life. Slowly, sneakily and unnoticed, tech giants have been able to change our behavior, our emotions, our thoughts, our world views and our relationships with other people. The curse of our times is this blindness and dizziness. It is time to wake up.

Seen from the offices of the CEO’s, the current public turmoil faced by the tech giants must be rather confusing. On the one hand, agitated politicians and intellectuals demand that the companies engage still more in the removal of content—of “hate speech”, “fake news”, extremism, defamation, Russian bots, nipples, pejoratives and a wide range of other things. On the other hand, a number of politicians and intellectuals—among them the authors of this very book—are accusing the giants of already removing way too much content, applying their narrow but at the same time vaguely worded community standards and the murky and uncontrollable enforcement of them. Unfortunately, the former of the two tendencies seems to have the upper hand at the moment.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, freedom of expression emerged as a central theme of the dawning Age of Enlightenment. This was caused not least by churches and princes maintaining strict political control of expressions of divergent opinions. The new Protestant state churches, Lutheran as well as Calvinist, turned out not to offer more freedom than the Catholic church. In fact, it was often less, which meant that religious, philosophical and political dissidents regularly ran into serious problems when expressing their ideas publicly. Thus, ideas of freedom of expression began to surface. One of the first urgent calls for freedom of expression came from Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who in his “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” (1670) called for libertas philosophandi—freedom of thought. As stated by British historian Jonathan Israel, Spinoza was the first major philosopher who was also a democrat. Spinoza believed it important to distinguish politically between people’s actions and their views and expressions. Whereas the former should be governed by legislators, the latter should not. This would create a more free and peaceful society—and if people had the possibility to influence the laws they were subject to, they might be more inclined to respect them.

In 2010, in an attempt to explore how technology promotes peace, Facebook launched a new feature ‘Peace on Facebook’: “Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.” Facebook keeps track of for instance how many “friendships” the company has helped create between people representing arch enemies such as Israel/Palestine, Pakistan/India and Ukraine/Russia under the headline “A World of Friends”. All of them great stories. But Facebook speaks less loudly when it comes to the role of the company in the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar. In 2014, Facebook moved into the country and within three years, the amount of users went from two to thirty million, and since then Buddhist extremists have used the platform to spread misinformation, encouraging violent upheaval. In 2017, propaganda, threats and coordination via Facebook became a contributing factor in this extensive ethnic cleansing. The fact that the conflict seems to have started with an Islamist massacre of Hindu villages in Rakhine state in August 2017, does not exempt Facebook for parts of the blame for the following escalating violence. In August 2018, after the UN had pointed to Myanmar military leaders as responsible for genocide, Facebook finally chose to remove 20 accounts of individuals and organizations from Myanmar’s top political management, among them General Min Aung Hlaing and the military television network Myawady—their Facebook pages were followed by as many as 12 million out of a total population of 53 million and had been used to encourage genocide. It was the first time Facebook banned political leaders from using the platform. The UN report criticized the role of Facebook as a useful instrument of the armed forces who incited the population to fight the Rohingya people. Facebook admitted that they had reacted too slowly.

For a long time during the 1990s and 2000s, positive stories about the Internet prevailed. A growing number of people with online access, first in the Western world, then gradually across the globe, would start a new era of Enlightenment with freedom of information and freedom of expression in a new radical sense. An unprecedented number of individuals would gain easy access to the large amounts of information uploaded by many different players, from individuals to media outlets, to organizations and government authorities. As a growing number of free search engines came about, it became easier to seek out information. There is no doubt that much of the elementary optimism was actually correct: the world has become a significantly more enlightened place thanks to the Internet, in the basic sense of “enlightenment” as the increased dissemination of information and knowledge—but also in the sense of Enlightenment as empowerment of the individual.

In light of the many problems caused by the tech giants’ somewhat opaque transformation of the public sphere, it is quite necessary to ask the question of how they can be brought to show greater accountability when it comes to the public sphere. It is not just a matter of pushing a few buttons—there are elementary structural defects to the very setup. There are two ways to change this: the coercive or the voluntary. The first is often discussed in terms of the increasingly monopolistic behavior of the giants. We have already touched upon their dominant role in the market. The present situation is a far cry from the anarchist—or free-market liberalist—Internet of the 1990s, with its diversity of users and small companies all competing with each other. The dot-com bubble burst around the turn of the millennium and wiped out many of the small firms, helping to usher in the next phase, the 2000s. Here, a few companies gradually gained control of the market, only to become the world’s richest during the 2010s. Scrooge McDuck’s amazing career from shoeshine boy to the richest duck in the world has long been replaced by the story of Mark the Nerd who founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, and long before turning 30 became one of the world’s most wealthy and powerful people. Facebook and Google are approaching a duopoly in the online advertising market based on non-paying users, with Microsoft and Apple bordering on duopoly in the field of software, and finally Amazon with its near-monopoly on Internet trade. The latter is less central to freedom of expression, but still includes a relevant dimension, as the size and market dominance of Amazon has made the company’s bookstore capable of putting unprecedented pressure on its suppliers—the publishing companies. The story of Jeff Bezos is well known, how he saw the enormous possibilities of Internet trading and decided to start from one corner: books. It was an industry of durable, easily transportable goods with a distribution network then dominated by small local players. It turned out to be the perfect place to launch a disruption of trade patterns through e-commerce. Amazon grew explosively and managed in but a few years to establish itself as a key player in the sales and distribution of books in many countries. Among the secrets to the company’s success was placing its headquarters in Seattle, in sparsely populated and remote Washington State, which meant that mail order buyers outside of the state could avoid taxes, allowing Amazon to undercut the prices of local bookstores. In the longer run, Amazon’s strength allowed the company to put pressure on the pricing policies of publishing companies.

In 2017, The Australian published a confidential document leaked from Facebook. It revealed how the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target ads to 6.4 million Facebook users as young as 14 who were going through psychologically vulnerable phases of their lives. In these phases, the teenagers felt “worthless”, “insecure”, “stressed” or “anxious”, among other things. To track these emotional downturns, Facebook had monitored the messages, images, interactions and activity of their users on the Internet.

In a Danish context, the first time the public was exposed to these flaws was in 2012. It was the seemingly banal case of documentary writer Peter Øvig Knudsen, who published the two-volume book Hippie about the Danish hippie movement and their so-called Thy Camp in 1970. The photo documentation of these books included photos from the camp, where hippies walked around naked, swam undressed and the like. It was, of course, a central part of the hippie movement. These seemingly innocent documentary photos, however, turned out to violate several standards of several tech giants.

In January 2017, George Orwell’s futuristic dystopian novel 1984 was brought back to life. The reason this 70-year-old classic all of a sudden became a no. 1 bestseller on Amazon is likely to be found in the White House. But in focusing too much on the dangers forecast in 1984, we should not forget an older and less famous vision, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is at least as relevant as the Orwellian dystopia. Its content easily translates to today’s criticisms of technology, as it describes how people will love the very same technology that deprives them of their ability to think clearly and critically. Both visions of the future have been put face-to-face by cultural and media critic Neil Postman: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.” Postman’s presumption, that Huxley’s future vision was not the least relevant of the two, rings truer today than ever before. In the Information Age, there is an abundance of information and competition over our attention. This has created an attention economy in which tech giants compete for harvesting the most attention and reselling it to third party advertisers. But this war over attention has its victims. First, it has led tech giants to develop still smarter designs whose purpose it is to create dependence. The idea is for users to spend as much time as possible on the platforms and click, like, share as often as possible—to engage. Second, companies add targeted, usually secret, ingredients to their algorithms, which then reward the content that attracts the most attention and traffic. This has led to a knowledge deficit in an online world dominated by emotions. We have long been blind to the negative consequences of this attention-based infrastructure and have come to love a technology that gobbles up our ability to think reflectively.

One thing is difficult to decipher: to what degree do tech giants actually see themselves as saving the world, and to what degree do they see themselves as capitalizing on it? Obviously, one does not exclude the other, but how do the two sides balance and what is the actual improvement the tech giants bring? In an interesting interview, Mark Zuckerberg defended the company’s treatment of user data by framing it as a historical philosophical trend where people are becoming more open and more willing to share data about themselves with friends, with companies, ultimately with anybody. But the trend is also a normative one: according to Zuckerberg, people must be brought to realize that they only have one identity. Not only does Zuckerberg here exalt himself as a philosopher but he apparently feels compelled to accept highly normative consequences of his own ideas—and to claim that these consequences should be acceptable to his users, imposing this philosophy on them. Everyone should know everything about everyone—this is the moral imperative Zuckerberg uses to legitimize his business model. Such an idea would erase the distinction between public and private, which has played an important role in modern societies where privacy has been considered a fundamental political good, and where the elementary freedoms of expression, of thought, of beliefs have been articulated to protect individuals and their sphere of privacy against government abuse and regimentation. The moral consequence of Zuckerberg’s dictum—beyond the very handy legitimization of his business model’s unlimited data collection—is that people should not behave differently in different contexts. You cannot be one person to your friends, then another to your family, and a third to your colleagues, etc. You cannot run away from your past, either, if suddenly something more preferable comes up. And neither can you evolve and develop your personality, put past mistakes behind you. In Zuckerberg’s line of thought, people bring their detailed digital identity with them everywhere and, what is more, that identity should be fully available to anyone. It is curious that he does not see how this would cause a tremendous loss of personal freedom—the freedom to evolve, change, apply different skills in different contexts. During the congressional hearings in April 2018, one Senator took a shrewd look at this data gathering and innocently asked Zuckerberg what hotel he was staying in while in Washington. Zuckerberg preferred not to disclose that information. Perhaps he did not want fans, journalists or assassins lurking around. But that would indeed be the collateral damage if he took his own medicine.

On May 15, 2018, Facebook continued its springtime campaign to restore its reputation in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A “Transparency” report was published, which included statistics on the extent of content removal, organized by category. Let’s look at for instance the category “Graphic Violence”: “In Q1 2018, we took action on a total of 3.4 million pieces of content, an increase from 1.2 million pieces of content in Q4 2017. This increase is mostly due to improvements in our detection technology, including using photo-matching to cover with warnings photos that matched ones we previously marked as disturbing. These actions were responsible for around 70% of the increase in Q1”. The numbers may seem high, but they only tell half the story. Another graph in the report shows that 71.56% of the 1.2 million users were tracked by Facebook itself, until user complaints started flooding in; in the first quarter of 2018, this figure rose to 85.6%. The fact that the number of removals tripled means that content removed because of user complaints rose from 341,000 to almost 500,000, in absolute figures, despite the decrease in percentage. So, the increase can be attributed not only to better tracking equipment, but also to more complaints favored. These numbers are a testimony to content removal on a disproportionately large scale, also known as censorship.

As mentioned above, the UN Declaration of Human Right states that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” This is freedom of expression in a broad sense, as the wording contains both individuals’ and organizations’ freedom to express themselves and their right to seek out information freely and search for information freely.

It is a well-known fact that the Internet represents a comprehensive and forceful media revolution. In only a few decades, it has connected billions of people all over the world and given them new access to large quantities of information. At the same time, it has put established media and information formats under pressure: newspapers, journals, CDs, radio and TV outlets, movies, books, etc. Still larger parts of the world’s marketing budgets migrate from these media to the online tech giants. To a large extent, the survival of established media now depends on whether they are capable of redefining themselves when faced with the Internet—either as dependent on it, by its terms, or as an alternative to it. This also creates new conditions for freedom of speech.

As we have seen, censorship is a real and serious problem when it comes to the tech giants. However, when they use the word “censorship” themselves, they often have something completely different in mind. That other something is copyright. Not surprisingly, the tech giants oppose copyright protections, since they wish to attract users by offering free access to a world of alluring content. Thus, by praising copyright infringements as though they were a matter of practicing free speech, they end up abusing the honorable name and reputation of free speech itself.

Due to the recent crises, Facebook is restructuring to restore the company’s reputation, which is, according to Zuckerberg, a three-year process. On April 24, 2018, Facebook published its updated internal guidelines for enforcement of the company’s community standards. It was the first time the public gained direct, “official” insight into this comprehensive hidden policing inside the company. The only glimpses behind the curtain provided before then came from confidential documents leaked to Gawker magazine in 2012, to S/Z in 2016—and in 2017, when The Guardian published “The Facebook Files”. They included comprehensive removal guidelines featuring a mixture of parameters, decision trees and rules of thumb—illustrated by many concrete examples of content to be removed, most likely taken from real ousted material of the time. As a contrast to this, the 2018 document is much more sparse, orderly and void of examples, and it is tempting to think that this is a combed-down version aimed for publication. Still, the document gives unique insight into the detailed principles for the company’s content removal—albeit not the enforcement procedure itself. One can only guess as to whether this surprising move away from secrecy can be attributed to the increasing media storm throughout 2017, culminating in the Cambridge Analytica revelation of March 2018 and the congressional hearings in April of the same year. The document contains six chapters: (1) “Violence and Criminal Behavior”, (2) “Safety”, (3) “Objectionable Content”, (4) “Integrity and Authenticity”, (5) “Respecting Intellectual Property” and (6) “Content Related Requests”.

Mimicry and deception are two important issues in studies about animal communication. The reliability of animal signs and the problem of the benefits of deceiving in sign exchanges are interesting topics in the evolution of communication. In this paper, we intend to contribute to an understanding of deception by studying the case of aggressive signal mimicry in fireflies, investigated by James Lloyd. Firefly femmes fatales are specialized in mimicking the mating signals of other species of fireflies with the purpose of attracting responding males to become their prey. These aggressive mimics are a major factor in the survival and reproduction of both prey and predator. It is a case of deception through active falsification of information that leads to efficient predation by femmes fatales fireflies and triggered evolutionary processes in their preys’ communicative behaviors. There are even nested coevolutionary interactions between these fireflies, leading to a remarkable system of deceptive and counterdeceptive signaling behaviors. We develop here a semiotic model of firefly deception and also consider ideas advanced by Lloyd about the evolution of communication, acknowledging that deception can be part of the explanation of why communication evolves towards increasing complexity. Increasingly complex sign exchanges between fireflies evolve in an extremely slow pace. Even if deceptive maneuvers are played out time and time again between particular firefly individuals, the evolution of the next level of complexity—and thus the next utterance in the dialogue between species—is likely to take an immense amount of generations