The computational gaze
Machines as a complementary lens
Originally published on cog & sprocket
I’ve written and spoken before about what I call mechanomorphism — a word that I developed to describe the concept of machine intelligence as a companion species. This framing of AI is distinct from anthropomorphism, where we try (and inevitably fail) to make machines approximate human behavior. Instead, I envision a future where we appreciate computers for the ways in which they’re innately “other”.
Another way to put it is that I’m fascinated by the computational gaze — how machines see, know, and articulate the world in a totally alien manner. I’ve been talking a lot with John Maeda, about computational literacy and how to help people understand foundational concepts of computing. But computational literacy posits the machine as a tool (which it often is!). The computational gaze, on the other hand, suggests the machine as a collaborator or companion intelligence.
Collaborating with machine intelligence means being able to leverage that particular, idiosyncratic way of seeing and incorporate it into creative processes. This is why we universally love the “I trained a neural net on [x] and here’s what it came up with” memes. It has this delightful “almost-but-not-quite-ness” to it that lets us delight in the strangeness of that unfamiliar gaze, but also…
