**Automatic Gnosis**: On Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae by Bogna Konior https://vimeo.com/702337492?ref=tw-share Fantastic video essay on Lem's view of technology and coevolution. *"Evolution is not guided by an active agent but by a distributed logic - if it has an end goal, it is wholly unknown to us.* *The desire to know and the volume of knowledge is accelerating, but the human mechanism for discerning patterns is weak, preventing our species from understanding the trajectory of our own evolution, much less being able to influence it.* *Submerged in such noise, human civilization is like a ship built without a blueprint and with no steersman."* Compare to Arthur Koestler's notion of sleepwalking. This also tracks with my idea employed in 1A syllabus on new forms of seeing and knowing that have to do with pattern recognition and hyper reading rather than literary ideas of close reading etc. *"Is it possible for something constructed by humans to exceed the knowledge capacity of its makers? Rather than creating ex nihilo, like God, humans create ex artificio - from artifice - creation and knowing by means of machine."* *"A black box, a [[System]] whose total inputs and outputs are not fully visible to the designer, all while the [[Design]] itself remains workable."* I wrote about this in [[Content Policy]] and the idea of [[Play]] as the only way to deal with the black box also appears in [[Rene Thom, Play]] *"This proposition is also a reversal of theological and evolutionary narratives. A scenario in which a less intelligent being - humans - might be able to simulate a more intelligent one. It is as if the monkeys were able to engineer divinity.* *The evolutionary significance of machines is so revealed in this automation of knowing. If in theology gnosis - knowledge - denotes insight into the infinite, and the deliverance of humanity from earthly constraints, a parallel phenomenon in Lem's narrative of technobiological evolution must be automated and mediated through a machine.* *And so, automatic gnosis rather than artificial intelligence describes this black boxed knowledge.* *Evolutionary processes are black boxed. Humans can learn to facilitate them, all the while accepting they may be unable to comprehend what they evolve"* [[AI]]