Preview The Allure of Machinic Life at Google Books.

I’m a little annoyed about the title, since I preferred “The Lure of Machinic Life” to “The Allure of Machinic Life.” However, the absolutely wonderful bit on me me me in the acknowledgments almost makes up for it. The book cover is extra-special, too, because it features a suggestive artwork by our friend Joseph Nechvatal.

John Johnston

I’m biased, but I’m also a pretty good critical reader – and this book is fantastic. I think it’s been mislabeled by the marketing people, so I’m afraid that it won’t be read – and that would really be a shame.

Review
“John Johnston is to be applauded for his engaging and eminently readable assessment of the new, interdisciplinary sciences aimed at designing and building complex, life-like, intelligent machines. Cybernetics, information theory, chaos theory, artificial life, autopoiesis, connectionism, embodied autonomous agents—it’s all here!”
—Mark Bedau, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Reed College, and Editor-in-Chief, Artificial Life

In The Allure of Machinic Life, John Johnston examines new forms of nascent life that emerge through technical interactions within human-constructed environments—”machinic life”—in the sciences of cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence. With the development of such research initiatives as the evolution of digital organisms, computer immune systems, artificial protocells, evolutionary robotics, and swarm systems, Johnston argues, machinic life has achieved a complexity and autonomy worthy of study in its own right.

Drawing on the publications of scientists as well as a range of work in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory, but always with the primary focus on the “objects at hand”—the machines, programs, and processes that constitute machinic life—Johnston shows how they come about, how they operate, and how they are already changing. This understanding is a necessary first step, he further argues, that must precede speculation about the meaning and cultural implications of these new forms of life.

Developing the concept of the “computational assemblage” (a machine and its associated discourse) as a framework to identify both resemblances and differences in form and function, Johnston offers a conceptual history of each of the three sciences. He considers the new theory of machines proposed by cybernetics from several perspectives, including Lacanian psychoanalysis and “machinic philosophy.” He examines the history of the new science of artificial life and its relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems (as illustrated by a series of experiments carried out on various software platforms). He describes the history of artificial intelligence as a series of unfolding conceptual conflicts—decodings and recodings—leading to a “new AI” that is strongly influenced by artificial life. Finally, in examining the role played by neuroscience in several contemporary research initiatives, he shows how further success in the building of intelligent machines will most likely result from progress in our understanding of how the human brain actually works.

Language is not only a virus (grin) but also an essential bit of the block of the discourse network that co-evolves with technological change and human action to give rise to the computational assemblage; or, machinic life is always already within you (and without you) but here are some of the details.

Now – go forth and buy many copies, and tell all thine friends (and thine enemies as well) to read and discuss.

Try these too!

• Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation
• Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler (Critical Voices) – (introduction, edited and translated)
• Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s the Recognitions and Postmodern Theory (Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction)
• Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84 – (translated)
• In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) – Jean Baudrillard – (translated)
• On The Line (Foreign Agents) – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – (translated)

I liked the fascinating graphic effects and the chill, yet weirdly comical, mood. I couldn’t have guessed where it was going, and I won’t spoil it for you – I’ll just say that I haven’t yet seen the synopsis that accurately described the movie. I love Philip K. Dick.

As usual, Keanu Reeves was the weak point of the film. I wish they would stop casting him in otherwise compelling movies. He just plays the same vapid creature in every movie. Winona Ryder was good, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane were great, and (surprisingly) Morton Robert Downey Jr. was outstanding. They might have done more with the theme of right brain/left brain competition, and there were a few things that didn’t add up, such as the transformation of the Ryder character into another woman – a hallucination? but also reality? From what I remember of Philip K. Dick novels, it’s a bit unlikely for there to be a scene in which the Ryder character expresses remorse. The dark-haired woman is a kind of recurring character. The ending also seemed wrong, or at least the information it conveyed shouldn’t have been quite at the end. This is one novel of his that I haven’t read, though, so I could be mistaken. A film is always different from the book, but it’s interesting to notice the things they feel obliged to change. Now I have to read the book.

The movie is worth seeing, but don’t bring the kids. I put it in my mental file next to Naked Lunch, Requiem for a Dream, and Trainspotting.

Finished Reading:

China Miéville, Looking for Jake: Stories – Stellar, top-notch, one of the best visionary writers I’ve seen since Borges. I wonder what it would take for China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer to collaborate on some project or other. They must have run into each other by now.

Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre (Anita Blake Vampire Hunter) – I was disappointed. I’ve read everything of hers now, and this is the weakest book she’s published. There is nothing driving the book. She’s lost the plot. As a consequence, even the sexy scenes have lost their punch. What’s going on? This is inferior to the rest of the series – it needed a rethink. I prefer the fae books to the vampire books anyway, but I feel cheated. I bought the hardback, and it was still missing a spine.

Still Reading:

Robert Baer, Blow the House Down

Po Bronson, The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley

In other news:

I set up the Machinic Life blog for my hubby John. The options are limited when you use the free blog from WordPress, but it will be enough to get him started. I added his curriculum vitae information as pages, although they need updating, and I’ll make a new header image in the next few days.

The little pond has finally formed an actual ecosystem. The fish are happy, a frog has adopted us, and I even saw a little brown scorpion scuttle across the rocks yesterday. There are arrowhead plants, and grasses, and a fountain of yellow irises past their bloom, and a lotus – and some kind of green plant that I threw in the water for the fish to nibble on has reproduced and sprouted tiny white flowers above the water. Unfortunately, the rest of the yard isn’t doing so well. I think I have to resign myself to the loss of the impatiens unless it starts raining a lot more. The hydrangeas didn’t produce flowers this year, and neither did my out-of-zone experimental lilacs. If I get ambitious this week, I’ll plant the rest of the monkeygrass (lariope) and go up and down the front hillside with my weed whacker. It’s difficult to force myself to do physical labor, however. The air itself seems stiflingly unclean in the hot humid lazy Atlanta summer. One of the hazards of living here is the mind-fog that hits at high summer. I don’t feel much like doing anything at all.