Informatons
I’ve been reading my assigned book for a monthly book club with a few friends. The current reading is on Non-things by Byung-Chul Han.
Intangibles
Han discusses the so called non-things. These are directly in opposition to things. In our current age, our lives are dominated by information, to the point that we have become aroused by it, and perceive of ourselves as so called datasexuals. “Being is information” (Han 5) and since information can be controlled, exploited, selectively chosen, we have in essence turned in the control of the terristrial for digitization. Its paradoxical that we believe that all of the conveniences of modern day technology would give us more free time to do the things we want when in reality we become subservient to the algorithm monster.
One of my favorite parts of Non-things is how Han describes the modern day equivalent of bread and circuses is that of phone games and universal basic income. Because of course it is, we amuse ourselves to death.
Machine Intelligence
I had a conversation with a friend over the book on Han’s take on Artificial Intelligence. Mind you, my friend is getting his PhD in the field so I wanted to see how he viewed the reading. The first point of interest is the concept of attunement. As Han describes it on pg. 39, the concept of attunement is the fundamental difference between human thinking and machine intelligence. What I am guessing the difference is that AI cannot make heads or tails of what is important to them. For them, all things are equally important and thus it’s thinking devolves into a “clatter of concepts and of the mere shells of words” (Han 39). This is a truly fascinating argument for why thinking is so much more nuanced than what meets the eye.
Data, Correlations, and Idiots
One of the things that my friend disagrees with on Han is the argument that “Artifical Intelligence never reaches the conceptual level of knowledge. It does not understand the results it computes.” (Han 42). He describes the phenomenon where given enough data, one can look into the inner workings of a model. When posing a question to a model, it astoundingly develops a line of reasoning for each step when trying to figure out the answer to the question posed. The model was never trained on a specific procedure, but the way that it breaks down problems is similar to how humans solve problems. Can we truly claim that models don’t understand at all the results of its computation?
A lasting passage that Han leaves me with is the idea that to truly think is to become an idiot when you trailblaze new concepts and ideas. But to a model thats been trained on the entire corpus of human text and the internet it is “too intelligent for becoming an idiot” (Han 44).
Personification of Things
A conversation with another friend led me down into a path of my childhood. How do children play with toys? I would like to certainly believe that Han would entertain the thought that playing with toys is superior to playing on an IPad or tablet as a kid. Growing up, I would assign sentimental value to the objects I interacted with. For example I would name inanimate rocks, assign my spot on the couch, or build out miniture forts in my room and name it something that I found to be cool. Whatever happened to that? I love how Han points out a particular feature of things, when a child touches a toy to play with it “the warmth of the hands is passed on to the things.” (Han 51). It is the touch of the child that transfers life into things, and it is the thing themselves that offers resistance and feedback to the child. Digitization offers no resistance, it doesn’t offer the conductiveness to transfer the warmth of our hands onto them, after all, they are Non Things. I do not personify the smartphone, the laptop, the smart watch. If one breaks do I really care? Let me just upgrade to the newer, better, faster version.
The Jukebox
Han closes out the book with a focus on the Jukebox. I will not pretend that I fully understand what he is trying to convey, I just want to interpret his writing in my own way. The Jukebox is in contrast to streaming music in the modern day. Why wait for our favorite songs to come on? Search them up on demand! Hell skip the parts you don’t like, just listen to your favorite song on repeat until you gorge yourself sick with the melody. The jukebox in comparison is very mechanical, as it “first has to be plugged in. It takes some time for the valves to warm up.” (Han 87). Only then when the vocal cords of the Jukebox are ready we can chamber a coin and listen. I really love the word that Han describes the music that comes out of the Jukebox, he says they are “thing noises”. Digital music carries no such thing, the Jukebox is kind of like live music, there are mechnical vocal cords akin to a human singing. There is no variance in digital music, it always sounds the same, and as Han puts it “it is bodiless and smooth” (Han 87). The concept of the body repeated comes across in Non-Things. To end off my analysis, I think a different way of thinking about things is that they exist in the same world as us. They experience decay, age, life, and death. Isn’t that beautiful?