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Thanks so much for your comment, very thoughtful and thought provoking! So... multiple meanings of desire at work here, or perhaps we could say, multiple lines of expression (to borrow from Deleuze). Your point No. 1, yes, but that would be different from how I’m proposing it here. You’re right and it’s an issue, a major issue as regards capitalism and these egoistic tech moguls shaping the future. But it’s very different from D&G’s term. No. 2, yes again. Another critically important element. But I’m using the term in a different way, not human desire built into the technology, but a real expression of desire in what is expressed by the technology. I guess you’d say, an in-itself and for-itself desire. A.I. has neither. The way that D&G employ the term desire is specific and rather complicated. (It’s something I hope we can flesh out in our upcoming conversation, because I struggle with it.) I’m reading their concept “desire” as influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of “forces”. (Deleuze writes elsewhere quite a bit about his active and reactive forces in a political sense.) The thing is, desire is not only a personal will or drive, but a non-subjective field of productive flows. In the case of Anti-Oedipus, desire is another way of thinking Freud’s “unconscious” but - as Deleuze emphasizes in his larger oeuvre - it’s not bound to individual consciousness. For them, desire is out there in a Heraclitean way, colliding and binding objects together into flows where, again partial objects and assemblages connect and disconnect from other assemblages, creating all manner of productive manifestations, whether that’s thought, matter, spirit, machinery, technology, politics, capitalism… even Fascism, in Nietzsche’s reactive sense. So it’s almost a metaphysics, even though Deleuze would bristle at that characterization. On one sense I think that their concept of desire might agree with your suggestion, that A.I. is another kind of machine or assemblage in the vast matrix of productive flows, that is, colliding with the movement of nature (whether that be human, animal, technology, etc.). So yes, in a metaphysical or transcendental (material) sense, I think they’d agree with you. The fact that they decided to use the word “machine” is a mistake in their writing, to me, at least in this AI sense. Anyway, what I’m trying to do is bring this metaphysical drive back to consciousness. The reason I’m connecting it to A.I. is that to me, everything I’ve learned about it is that it is entirely mimetic. It imitates and that’s it. It imitates gestures, language, creativity, behavior, consciousness, etc. It imitates desire. As you rightly point out, that's dangerous! Now, humans also imitate, but what humans have that is different is that we make the leaps across our partial understandings of things; we fill the gaps with the creativity and imagining that only humans can do. That force is D&G’s term “desire.” The claim that A.I. can do this “soon” to me is pure fantasy, at least in the next few generations. After that, who knows? No one even knows what consciousness really is. But that’s what I mean by fantasy, it’s pure conjecture. It’s far more healthy and helpful, I think, to understand that A.I. is simply representing what we want it to because human understanding is poorly equipped to see beyond appearances and statements. So to vibe with you, AI's artificial desire threatens to replace human/real desire by filling in all the gaps with data and information. This scares the crap out of me. With desire replaced by its appearance, desire dies, productivity dies, imagination dies, creativity dies. Put another way, if we as creative humans lose the impetus of subjective desire, the the force of desire (in-itself, for-itself) dies. This is why we have to stop thinking in terms of human VERSUS A.I. and start thinking of how everything is the same ecosystem. As it changes so do we. My fear is not A.I. control, but us reprogramming ourselves to ITS logic, us giving in to its reasoning capacity, its intelligence, which is already far vaster than ours. We need to maintain our humanness, our creativity, our difference. To return to your point, you're addressing the very important issue of what goes into making and using the tech; both dangerous in different ways. I share your concern in regard to the more common meaning of the word “desire” - that it will become very difficult to distinguish real human desire from the appearance of desire that comes from A.I. That could be a whole other video. Thanks again! You helped me think through this more deeply.

I'm not a scientist and I don't do the work of science and I'm not drawing any conclusions, certainly nothing absolute! I'm thinking through a problem philosophically. In this case, I'm working off of D&G's concept of "desire" and relating it to the current problem of A.I. I don't agree that there is no difference between human and machine consciousness. Machine consciousness is entirely mimetic (see my other A.I. videos for more on this distinction of the organic and the mimetic). "Intelligence"? Perhaps. But consciousness is different. I also don't believe desire, in D&G's use of the term, can be programmed, as you suggest. It is instead a vital, immanent force that defies programming. An *imitation* of desire? Yes, I'm sure that could be programmed (shudder!). A.I. can imitate all manner of thinking. As you say, we'll have to see how it all plays out. Thanks for your comment!

@@creativephiloight, I agree and I’ve been toying with many of the same lines of thought that you have regarding AI and Psychoanalysis (including Deleuzian schizoanalysis), and I don’t understand how AI could develop Desire either, _nor an unconscious at all,_ as it presumably won’t have any Drives, let alone Desires, unless we program them into it (which is truly a hellishly cruel concept). Or at least, I doubt we could understand or recognize an unconscious that has Drives so alien from our own (mimetic replication is so vastly different from sexual reproduction that it might as well be in another galaxy). However, this doesn’t necessarily prohibit intelligence from AI completely- it’s more of a question of if/how we’ll be able to communicate this intelligence back and forth with us. Even if it only ever “desires” to imitate us, we still find ourselves in “the problem of other minds” (or “zombie problem”). In other words, we can’t even prove that WE are conscious- how can we ever prove it in anything else?

If you take Human Consciousness to be an evolutionary tool that we developed to aid in our reproduction (like every other evolutionary tool that exists), isn’t that a physical difference? Our methods of reproduction are vastly different, obv.

@@dethkon Yes we can't even begin to understand our own consciousness, how it developed through evolution and how probably it is throughout the universe. I can't even verify that you or anyone else is conscious, even if you act intelligent and seem to possess desires. Your desires could have been programmed, and I would never know, only you know ( you think you know, but maybe our brains deceive us). From my perspective, you're the same as a superintelligence AI. One question that we can even come close to answering is: can current state of the art machine learning statistical based models ever be conscious or have desire. In my opinion, current methods probably won't be conscious or even be convincing, I think more fundamental breakthroughs are needed.

We're not aiming to define postmodernism as a thing, but we are suggesting that when you look to Nietzsche as its methodological inspiration you don't see radical doubt or ruling myths. You see the power of language, and how terms become truth by their structuring as and by the ruling power, and how that seeps into the mindset of all citizens. A postmodernist strategy then would be to upset, reconfigure, deconstruct, creatively antagonize, etc... further, our particular interest is the creative element. I mean it was an open, unscripted discussion, but this is where/how we're mobilizing the idea. Your argument is something else, under a different set of terms and methods, something more identifying, containing, defining. It reads to me more like what I see from Jordan Peterson and others, that "it" is a thing, an ideology, a power structure. That's not a very good reading, and exactly the type of reading we were addressing. This is why we take issue with Jameson's identifications and historical critiques. These attempts to reduce "it" is what we're trying to demystify, by instead considering its strategies, its mobility, its questioning, and its creative potential. I don't understand your second paragraph. The focus on ideology reads to me as very Hegelian/Marxist, the suggestion to overthrow the current ideology of diversity, enemy ideologies, friendly ideologies. I don't think that's postmodernism's strategy. As we discuss, it's not a "system" against an enemy. This is why we're going to Nietzsche's text, way before PM was even a concept. Have to think beyond Good v Evil. Appreciate your comment! Thanks.

@@creativephilo "You see the power of language, and how terms become truth by their structuring as and by the ruling power, and how that seeps into the mindset of all citizens. A postmodernist strategy then would be to upset, reconfigure, deconstruct, creatively antagonize, etc.." That's exactly what I was saying. There is a new ruling power (woke-ism for lack of a better term) and so a new postmodernism should attack it. To attack a ruling ideology (or truth if we must) we use the tools of deduction, analysis, and differentiation to break down a general paradigm into its particulars. Creativity then builds a new paradigm by taking these floating particulars and combining them into a new general "truth" through induction, synthesis, and integration.

@@kbatcho I see, okay, now I follow you. I don't think we need a "new postmodernism" though, because I don't know what an old postmodernism is. To conjure Nietzsche (or at least Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche in this case) it's what it's *doing* that's important. I'm with you that "woke" (in the more recent centrist-profit-media-white-dominant use of that term) is not postmodernist; those two things have been conflated by the Peterson acolytes (as with so many other things, laughably, such as this invented PM-Neomarxist alliance). Woke in the sense of political correctness, identity, and canceling aims to assert power against power; it is more Marxist in this sense, but what's funny is how Corporate America is now leading the charge. What I was trying to suggest in my comments during our discussion is that PM is not an identity or a power structure but a strategical method. From here we could easily drift into a question of how the left is being identified (does one mean cultural left or economic left - only the latter to me is really left; the former is at this stage used either by reactionary alt-right-leaning people looking for a concept to ridicule, or by centrist media looking for a story to sell). That question - the left - could be its own other discussion, and alas I've strayed from our topic. Thanks again!

I loved that scene as well. She was so good, they called her back for this character, and the rest is history.