Toru Nishigaki: On the Informatic Turn caused by the Generative Artificial Intelligence

Описание: What is the Informatic Turn? It is a philosophical, cultural and social metamorphosis on a global scale, which extends and develops the Linguistic Turn proposed in the 20th century. And the Generative AI like ChatGPT, typical of current digital technology, is expected to play an essential role for realizing the Informatic Turn. Since its appearance at the end of 2022, the Generative AI has acquired world-wide attention. Especially business circles welcome it, because of its advanced technical ability to offer friendly statements as well as pictures rapidly at the requests of general public. Nevertheless, if things go wrong, its misuse has the risk to undermine the fruit of the Linguistic Turn - the respect for diverse cultures emphasized by Claude Lévi-Strauss - and it may revive the western one-dimensional modernism. To avoid this lamentable transformation, it is needed to clarify the essential characteristics and limitations of mechanical digital information processing, based on neocybernetics.

Our group is engaged in the construction of neocybernetics research field termed Fundamental Informatics based on autopoiesis theory, while reconsidering the concept of information fundamentally. Three kinds of information are defined there. The first one, the widest sense, is “life information” that is the meaning/value created in the body of a living thing. The second one, the usual sense, is “social information” that is the combination of the meaning with a sign (signifiant) for social communication. And the third one, the narrowest sense, is “mechanical information” that is the pseudo-independent sign separated temporarily from the meaning for efficient processing. The essential difference between living things and machines as systems was made clear by autopoiesis theory. It ensured that autonomy could only be found in living things. The AI, though it looks working independently, processes only mechanical information, and is essentially under eventual control of human beings. In this respect, it is far from animals or plants which basically refuse direct control.

However, human beings have dual features. They think or behave depending not only on biological autonomy but also on certain heteronomy, because they communicate as social beings using shared signs and rules. This duality of autonomy and heteronomy, although hard to analyze by conventional autopoiesis theory, can be explored by Fundamental Informatics. The analysis shows that, through wrong use of Generative AI, the undesirable Informatic Turn invites the increase in heteronomy and decrease in autonomy, and reduces human beings to mere machine parts, while degrading freedom and creativity. Since the essence of the Generative AI is heteronomous, its enlarged influences will lead to human beings becoming heteronomous entities.

It is the extension of western modernism to believe that the meaning/value of every object in the cosmos is pre-given and therefore can be accurately recognized by big-data processing. But Francisco Varela, one of the founders of autopoiesis theory, did not think in that way. Rather, he got interested in early Mahayana Buddhism, and insisted that the meanings of the world for each living thing emerge at every moment based on its action history. I suggest that the desirable Informatic Turn, following the Linguistic Turn, should be in line with such diverse cultural viewpoints.

Toru NISHIGAKI is Professor Emeritus of the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. He acquired the Ph.D degree in information engineering in 1982 from the University of Tokyo. After having been engaged in the research and development of computer systems in Hitachi, Ltd., Japan, he became interested in philosophical, cultural and social aspects of information technology. Especially he has devoted himself to the building and development of Fundamental Informatics based on autopoiesis theory of neocybernetics for over 30 years. He taught it as a professor at the University of Tokyo, Meiji University and Tokyo-Keizai University.

Among his many related works, representative books are Fundamental Informatics vol.1-3 (2004, 2008, 2021), and Digital Narcissists (1991). His recent books are The Trap of a Digital Society (2023), The Super Digital World (2023), The Principle of Artificial Intelligence (2018), Big data and Artificial Intelligence (2016), etc.

He was awarded several prizes such as the Best Paper Prize of the Information Processing Society of Japan, the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities, the Prize for Telecom Social Sciences, The Prize of the Society of Socio-Informatics for Distinguished Works.