Differences between alternative configurations and formal states might well have very different meanings in different contexts— something that would actually present a technical problem for an instrumental AI, but not for an organism or an artwork. Omohundro worries about “how an AI can ensure that future self-modifications will accomplish its current objectives? For one thing, it has to make those objectives clear to itself,” which seems to be the opposite of The Thing’s performance. “If its objectives are only implicit in the structure of a complex circuit or program, then future modifications are unlikely to preserve them,” unless the only objective is to not be thingself ; or rather, unless the actual goal would be to keep thingself amorphous enough to have very different meanings in very different contexts, drawing, in Johannes Göransson’s words, a“transgressive circulation”, which “makes us uncertain, opens us to the weirdness of art”. That is, to an extreme artform where the creature’s only way to communicate is to kill and copy its interlocutor. Rather than a postsemantic singularity —which is to be expected from the actions of a (presumably cybernetic) protean post-human hyperagent —we must confront the eternal return of a presemantic multiplicity. The return of a real that never was.
GERMÁN SIERRA