Some thoughts on AI and pataphysics

Laura Kerr, the Canadian artist and poet, wrote on Bluesky recently, AI is quite possibly, for the most part, a Pataphysical invention because the imaginary solution is the intelligence itself!

This warrants pondering. What imaginary solutions account for AI’s intelligence?

They predict the truth, but can never truly know it. Yet certain abilities once thought to be the sole domain of mankind are shown daily to be mastered by computers: imaginary feats now frequently non-imaginary. As the machines surpass human skill in certain areas, their methods will be increasingly beyond human comprehension – perhaps also a form of the imaginary.

AI operates endlessly and without rest, with the capacity of several people, like a 10-man bicycle team. The computer was supposed to be a bicycle for the mind. The AI, then, must be a bicycle for the computer. Recall that Jarry wrote of that 10-man-bicycle team racing a locomotive, and of a painting machine that ejaculated art and whose creations were (implicitly but unstated by Jarry) indistinguishable from those of a human painter. The absurd has become as real as reality has become absurd.

We cannot help but conclude, then, that a greater proportion of the unacknowledged pataphysics of the universe will be correctly accepted as equally valid to the traditional explanations for things, and so the concentration of pataphysics in the universe will necessarily strengthen. Whether it proves too corrosive is a question still to be determined, for certain aspects of its influence are more caustic than others.