The other dimension

The other day I was sitting together with a friend, chatting about human and artificial intelligence and the calculability of everything. We talked about Her and life emerging Ex Machina. Emotions – they play a role, and we have, can, should simply enjoy them. That moment, I could not agree more, did not want to think about rationalising every single step, did not want to stop enjoying the moments, loving the people when they are lovable and showing the anger  when anger is appropriate … – Isn’t it finally true?: Wer denkt, ist nicht wütend.  Here for the first part of the Docu in Theodor W Adorno, Der Bürger als Revolutionär.

The less revolutionary version coming to mind is the one we know from Einstein:

Falling in love is not at all the most stupid thing that people do — but gravitation cannot be held responsible for it.

wisely popularised as “You can’t blame gravity for falling in love”.

Love or show anger …, carpe diem and give the answer …

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Anyway, a few days later a headline hits the news, informing that a

Tesla driver dies in first fatal crash while using autopilot mode

Surely a sad occurrence, but what makes it remarkable for me here is a sentence I find in the article, saying that

America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an inquiry into the accident.

It leaves  me with a silly question. As sociologist I know that that NHTSA is an institution, following administrative and juridical rules, without “human intelligence”, reflecting law that is without consideration of right. As driver of a car I know that there is no point in asking the truck and trailer; and the sky …, it does have as many answers as it lacks having limits. So, at the end it may then be the driver of the truck who may be be blamed for being, for taking the freedom of being in the way of artificial rules …

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Part of the limitations of artificial intelligence, in its excess child of bourgeois enlightenment, is surely that it established a certain inability to think unity as matter of contradiction. To take it from Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

There is surely some Madness of Sincerity of which I learned again – finally

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.”

It may then be that The Fall comes before The Stranger.