An Argument for an Ecosystemic AI: Articulating Connections across Prehuman and Posthuman Intelligences

As an art collective Cesar & Lois develops projects that examine sociotechnical systems, attempting to challenge anthropocentric technological pathways while linking to intelligences sourced in biological circuitry. As artists we imagine new configurations for what we understand as (social, economic, technological) networks and intelligences. With this ecosystemic approach we consider the possibility of an artificial intelligence (AI) that supports well-being in a broad sense, accommodating relationships across different layers of living worlds and involving local and global communities of all kinds. This thinking is grounded in research by theorists across disciplines, including communications and media theory, microbiology, anthropology, decolonial studies, social ecology, sociology and environmental psychology. At a time when human beings and their ecosystems face grave threats due to climate change and a global pandemic, we are rethinking the basis for our AIs, and for the resulting decision-making on behalf of societies and ecosystems. Creative projects by Cesar & Lois provide alternative conceptual models for thinking across networks, reframing the artists’ and potentially viewers’ understanding of what motivates and shapes societies. Referencing a series of artworks and the theories that underpin them, this article envisages a sociotechnical framework that takes into account ecosystems and challenges the philosophical orientations that guide society. Degenerative Cultures is an artwork in which the artists overlap microbiological organisms, AI and human systems as a speculative restructuring of networks across human and nonhuman entities. The push for ecosystemic technologies and intelligences is linked to the expansion of community to include planetary constituents, such as nonhuman beings and environments. The artists posit that such ecosystemic networks would be capable of taking into account the planet’s human societies as well as nonhuman species and their environments, broadening the concept of community well-being and shifting the technological architecture to meet the complex needs of the planet and its constituent parts. The experimental series, [ECO]nomic Revolution, layers Physarum polycephalum, or slime mold, over the mapped demographics of human cities. The species polycephalum references multi-brains, and implies a decentralized logic, which for the non-neurological microbiological network translates to the sharing of nutrients and regulated growth across a culture. Assuming a perspective based in the arts, this proposition imagines a shift from the dominant conceptions of AI as an individual intelligence and frames it as part of a network that necessarily includes ecosystems. We envision the creation of sociotechnical systems that could be modeled on networked lifeforms that have optimized themselves across millions of years, like the organism Physarum polycephalum, which occurs globally in moist environments, or like those microbial populations within and outside of human bodies, whose percussive biological processing interacts with and alters many layers of lifeforms. We argue that an environmentally responsive intelligence based on relationships across living systems potentially serves a broad community composed of diverse human populations, nonhuman beings and ecosystems.