They might have sought to describe the advent of machine intelligence, like monotheism and democracy before it, as a meta-governance event in human history. Normatively understood, from the governance studies standpoint, meta-governance is defined as the governance of governance. That might include the following variables: the design of regulatory frameworks; the co-ordination of governance systems that can produce either public, private, or hybrid mechanisms to achieve overarching policy goals; that ideally have an embedded reflexive steering capacity to adapt. What these technocratic definitions are good at is giving the impression of the scale and ambition of such policy. What it often leaves out, that’s an intrinsic feature of a cultural sociological conception of meta-governance, is the capacity for governance to produce more governance.

We can further define the advent of monotheism and democracy as meta-governance events in human history because as cultural institutions they are governance concepts now thoroughly embedded in the body-politic. Fundamentally concerned with, and practically involved in, steering humanity towards the beneficial and away from the harmful. That along with the longevity of their profound influence we can also attest to the extent of their defining moral character; how we inhabit what they’ve conceptually been able to provide is another thing altogether. Such meta-governance events, regardless of how you view their success or shortcomings, were intentionally produced to address the dilemmas of their time. They return to the age-old questions of the why and how of governance. Why we need to address, and how we need to create, the requisite steering controlling powers to produce the best outcomes given the contingencies of our human constructed realities. So, the first idea to parse is that certain historical conditions produce meta-governance events, that given the scale of their cultural impact and longevity, they are also intrinsically-necessarily involved with establishing pragmatic moral advances toward the evolution of the human condition.

Our putative counterfactual Cybernomos Institute did not emerge from the height of the cybernetic moment of the late 1950’s. Yet a situational awareness regarding the duality, the indeterminate virtue, of machine intelligence could have included the following further justification for setting it up, both then and now. Culturally, such a prescient awareness, could have reasonably drawn the conclusion that it would be difficult, if left unaddressed, to separate out machine intelligence, as a competing form of ‘other’ intelligence with that of the science fiction imaginary-SFI. Thereby coopting it with our imaginations as another form of ‘alien’ intelligence. That is if the ‘otherness’ of endogenous intelligence of machine learning could not be adequately conceptualized and communicated, it would lose out to those articulated by science fiction.

The Narrative Problem

Culturally speaking the notion of alien other intelligence would be determined by the imaginative realm of science fiction; it would therefore ultimately distract from, and control, the narrative regarding the virtues good or bad of machine intelligence. In order to rectify this there would have needed to be a mandate to keep the technological developments of endogenous machine intelligence front and center in public consciousness. Without it incoherence concerning the public conception of machine intelligence would occur, and this is exactly what we’ve inherited. We’re surprised by the advent of AI in the 2020’s not just because of its sudden development, but also because of this conflation between our remarkable endogenous efforts and the exogenous alien intelligences of our imaginations. Largely due to the fact that the endogenous trajectory of technological development has this stealth component, it’s now thoroughly enveloped by the SFI. Within the field of cybernetics this was actually conceived as a serious problem at the time. As in should we take our cybernetic futures seriously, or are we getting caught up in plain old wild imaginings? Metaphysically speaking, it might have been useful to insist that if it exists in the imagination then its likely to occur.

Granted, it would have been difficult to preemptively address control issues regarding the ‘real’ aspects of unprecedented socio-economic change presented by the meta-governance advent of machine intelligence. Or indeed the perceived duality regarding the indeterminate virtue of the technology itself, without experientially feeling its embrace. So in terms of the extent of cultural influence regarding the notion of artificial intelligence, the void systematically left at an institutional level was filled with fears of rampant technology overplayed and dominated by the SFI. Hyperstitional problems that have now been extended into the very nomenclature of the field itself. Where the notion of AI would be a better descriptor of the exogenous alien intelligence of our imaginations, and SAI, symbiotic artificial intelligence, the endogenous product with which we are now jointly involved in developing.