AI as hyperobject

The ecophilosopher Timothy Morton defines hyperobjects as ‘entities’ that are so pervasive that they transcend specific locations or moments in time, making them difficult to grasp or comprehend fully. He gets a bit esoteric, calling these phenomena '...of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place'. He also throws in some weird quantum theory, albeit slightly superfluous, but we get his basic thesis.

(C'mon, it's not proper philosophy without a touch of inscrutability...)

Essentially, Morton challenges anthropocentric perspectives and encourages a more holistic understanding of everything's interconnectedness.

Examples of hyperobjects include climate change, nuclear radiation, pollution and, most recently, the 'ultimate' hyperobject; COVID.

These ‘objects’ are 'recognisable' by their distribution across time and space, their massively entangled nature, and their capacity to affect humans (and nonhumans) on a global scale.

Given the trajectory of AI applications today, it could be argued that AI might shortly be considered a hyper object. The popular cliche is that 'data is the new oil'. According to Morton, oil itself is the hyper object of capital that 'shapes our lives but is too big to see'. Likewise, data shapes AI and, at the risk of mixing metaphors too much, is also a hyper object—a meta-hyper object, even.

AI is obviously now becoming pervasive, integrated into more and more aspects of daily life, from all the LLM things we are now all familiar with to healthcare diagnostics and autonomous vehicles. And because AI systems are distributed across devices, servers, and networks this distribution makes them omnipresent, influencing environments and societies on a global scale, without us being remotely aware of its influence.

Deeply entangled with numerous aspects of human life, economy, politics, and culture, its effects are interwoven with other complex systems, creating a web of influence that will be difficult to disentangle. Given the velocity of this expansion, it will get harder by the day.

There’s also a kind of 'temporal distribution’ to these effects. They evolve under their own logic; this temporal span makes their full scope difficult to pinpoint at any given time. In the same way, the internet didn't just appear overnight; it developed over decades and continues to evolve. Its presence and influence are distributed over time, affecting past, present, and future generations. Inevitably, the influence of AI is going to extend far beyond immediate applications, affecting long-term societal structures, ethical considerations, and even the way humans understand themselves and their capabilities and likely further beyond human perception.

What’s becoming interesting is that despite originating from markedly different points of view, various branches of philosophy are beginning to converge on shared concerns about what is coming down the line for the human condition. Morton's ecological philosophy focuses on hyper objects as vast, entangled systems that evade comprehension, and then there’s Baudrillard's postmodern critique of the proliferation of hyperreality, where simulations and media distort our sense of the real. Both philosophers highlight the resulting alienation and disconnection from authentic experiences.

Pervasive systems—whether ecological or mediated—shape human existence in profound and often disorienting ways. But the relentless progress of the new wave of 'invisible' systems represents a significant shift in social life.

'Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object tries to resist.'

Historically, social life—for better or worse—was predominantly influenced by visible, localised structures such as family, community, and human institutions. However, the rise of technological mediation, almost to totality, is introducing new forms of hyper-object influence that operate on a massive scale yet remain, for the most part, hidden from direct human perception—and given the recent pronouncements from the likes of Wolf Herd and the comedically deranged Altman - even that of its makers.