The Red Earth Project (2019-)
1. What Lies Beyond the Red Earth?
An extract from the essay closing the book appears in the Paris Review. This essay considers the legacies of language, natural resources, and hypocrisies of a dominant moral order all bound up in ‘AI’ futures.
- “The fervor for AI’s ascension to a plane beyond us is a quasi-spiritual desire, echoing the past’s metaphysical anxieties and our need to see something, possibly something monotheistic, beyond ourselves. It seems now, through probabilistic methods, the hallowed saint forms in our image as we shape greater systems of knowledge to further a delusion, synthesizing the spectacle of an impressionistic, all-seeing and all-doing deity and, yes, a moral authority to whom we’ll perform worship through mimetic ritual. This supposed moral authority remains a primary weapon for today’s technological and economic shackling of and extraction from the human condition.”