Bangkok Diary, 2025
Notes from an intense week of workshopping
Thoughts on Being and Time, Borg style, in the age of AI; short film screening at Bangkok Kunsthale tonight. Ibn Khaldun discussion kicks off.
The Contraptions Book club March pick is Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biopgraphy, by Robert Irwin. Chat thread. Discussion week has kicked off! The May pick is The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein.
I’m heading into the finale of a rather intense week in Bangkok, where I’ve been helping facilitate a workshop on distributed AI and blockchain futures. Or to be more accurate, trying not to get in the way of a couple of dozen younger and more energetic people boldly and imaginatively wrap their minds around futures I’ll live to see much less of than they will. The workshop was structured as a pop-up studio, and I wasn’t quite sure where we’d end up, but it’s turned into a rather complex collaborative short film production effort using Sora and other AI tools, which we will screen at a local gallery (the Bangkok Kunsthale) this evening. Here’s the event announcement — join us if you happen to be in Bangkok.
As someone with zero experience of film-making, I’ve been mostly reduced to a spectator as more capable people get the thing done in the final hours. It’s been interesting to be peripherally involved in an AI use effort that goes beyond text and static images.
Inhabiting a soup of fragments of moving images, emerging from a mix of camera-eye memories, textual story ideas turned into storyboards (with AI of course) and thence into visual shots, and impressionistic image-ideas animated in silico with elan vital, is about as close as you can get to being a neuron inside a human brain evolving in real time. Except in this case, it’s a temporary brain hallucinated into existence by a couple of dozen people inhabiting the same AI-mediated headspace.
The metaphor that came to mind for me was “guppies in a pensieve” (as in the Harry Potter artifact where Dumbledore stores his memories). Imagine a shared pensieve as a fishbowl, and individual humans as little guppies swimming around in it. The “water” is an AI-mediated context that allows for a truer inhabiting of a shared headspace than I think traditional film-making tools probably allow. Not that I’d know.
The thing that has struck me the most powerfully about the experience is that the very nature of being and time — in the sense that philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre have understood those concepts in the West, and various Buddhist philosophers in the East — are being remade as we speak. You wouldn’t know it if you haven’t seriously used AI tools yet, or only used text generation and static image tools, in relatively conventional “personal assistant” ways. But if you surrender to much more totalizing AI-mediated cognitive processes, especially along with other people, you get a much better sense of what’s going to happen to humanity in the coming decades.
I’m only beginning to dimly grasp the contours of this unfolding transformation, but some axioms for my personal philosophy of it are already clear.
Text and static images, “objectively” manipulated using chat-like tools, are relatively weak entry drugs for creating strong hive minds; much more potent stuff is coming
“Intelligence” as such does not exist. There are only memories and transformations of memories through sensation and internal ferment, mediated primarily by symbols, textual and oral language, and moving images.
The primary shaper of intelligence is the bandwidth of the feedback loops between internalized and externalized memories. Many internalized memories can inhabit the same context of externalized memories, making hive minds possible.
Being and time emerge at any scale where a contained soup of transforming memories achieves critical density, embodied as live connections of active and uninterrupted signaling, limited only by memory bandwidth bottlenecks.
Particular container boundaries like skulls and computer cases, particular connection modalities like spoken language and PCIe slots, and particular temporal scaffoldings like clock time or computing event time don’t matter much.
Being and time are about to become design variables rather than just unalterable conditions of existence for “intelligences” in particular biological form factors — ie us in our skulls.
One way to think about this is as follows — setting aside the materiality of being-and-time (which admittedly is not a trivial move) — being-and-time are beginning to emerge and persist in much more fluid ways than we’re used to, because a kind of potential-equalization has been achieved.
Just like water flows in a given direction when there’s a gradient, but puddles up when there isn’t, “intelligence” too is an experience of a gradient-driven flow of being-and-time. When the gradient between loci of such experiences and their environments vanishes, the “intelligence” too stops being a flow, and becomes more of a puddle defined by the bandwidth of connectivity among interacting loci. But this cannot happen to any significant degree even in the most intimate context of humans lacking the mediating capabilities of AI.
What AI does is create superfluid liquidity in the intelligence “market” among humans by making the interstitial intersubjective environment between humans “intelligent” too, in an equi-potential sense. If you and I are two buckets of water, we’ve been effectively poured into a bathtub containing some “artificial water.” It’s a near-perfect memory market.
Yes, it’s going to be an radical intensification of intimacy and an awkward but inexorable assault on individual subjectivity on a global scale, and I suspect a big fraction of humanity will violently resist it. But as fictional prefigurations of this condition suggest, resistance will be futile. Existentialists who insist on the “irreducible subjective” are going to find it increasingly tough to maintain their ontological stances. There may be technologically mediated irreducible privacy (in the informational sense of say zero-knowledge proofs or wallfacers in the Three-Body Problem) but I strongly suspect that is neither necessary, nor sufficient to preserve subjectivity in the sense we are used to. All your memories are belong to us.
Curiously, though I’m a pretty private and introverted person overall, this future doesn’t disturb me much. In a way I think it’s because my current individual-sized mind feels kinda ready for assimilation in the sense of being already pretty open and legible enough for assimilation-type processes. Famous last words perhaps.
Have you read Octavia Butler’s Patternist books? Recommended!