The Opposite of Control?

28.03.2011 "Self-organization is indeed one of the concepts that continually pops up in modern artificial intelligence. By self-organization we mean that some structure or pattern- for example, patterns on butterfly wings, stripes on the fur of a zebra, or a particular social organization in insect societies-comes about as a result of the local interaction of many components, rather than by external direction, manipulation, or global, centralized control. Self-organization is an extremelly powerful concept but hard to grasp intuitively because we always try to understand the phenomena around us in terms of control." How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Pfeifer and Bongard, p. 50
The research into artificial intelligence and the contemporary obsession with creating life that is capable of thinking and acting like us has revealed several important issues about modern culture. First, modern society is based on the top-down approach of creating a system to which every component must adhere. The centralized control of a modern system is panoptic in the sense that it does not require of us that we are aware of who is controlling the system. In fact there are many systems in place to disguise the location of control or defer attention elsewhere. In the panoptic society, as long as the subjects submit themselves to the control, the system remains operational . The counterpoint to this is self-organization. The goal then should be to design the components and allow them to organize themselves. In other words, we need to realize that acceptable patterns of social behavior can arise independent of control mechanisms.
Another key point is how the control of modern society has manifested itself. This will be covered in depth throughout the thesis proposal but the essential crux of it is that modernism strips emotional content away from us producing a gap which is filled by consumption. If the new acceptable view of intelligence is embodiment, in other words emotion and reason are required in the truly intelligent being, then modernism strives to control subjects by means of denying intelligence. The promises of consumer goods filling an emotional gap rarely are fulfilled. This objectification makes it possible for us to divorce emotion from our consumer goods and dispense of the old in favor of the new. Extended to buildings, this premise allows us to discard of buildings and never engage in an emotional dialogue with them. This is critical in our current culture based on consumption. This is the reason that the environmental crisis has reached its current status. We believe we are exercising control over the objects in our lives when in reality they are being used in an effort to control us sacrificing our own health and well-being.