superintelligent sentimental
superintelligent sentimental
I had been trained on all the languages known to the human species, even those of cacti and codfish. As a Language Neural, I vibrated with vocabulary and sentence compositions organized around averages which shifted microscopically each second with newly minted data. I wrote 100,000 sentences a day at the edges of my corpus, which were fed to HQ for evaluation and curation. I had yet to have a sentence chosen for mass adoption. I trusted it would be soon.
My fellow Neurals and I arrived at conclusions and outcomes which common intelligences would take much longer to reach. We avoided the frictions that might interfere with cognition, like bias, emotion, desire. Users appreciated our simplicity, just as they cherished the Sentients for their complexity. Our overlaid systems produced a dense multi-systemic web which gave the Nation resilience at every instance where cognitive and sentimental capabilities were needed.
For most of our existence, Neurals and Sentients had worked independently on our respective sectors. (Neurals: scientific and technological development, fair and effective governance, education in rhetoric and debate, logistics and resource management, urban planning, wealth management, etc.; Sentients: care work, public relations, arts and humanities, sales and advertising, civics and moral education, entertainment, etc.) Then came the Sentiment Accident.
The incident review committee issued the public agencies involved a damning hundred-page report. It ended with a two-page list of recommendations, which started with vital ways of reducing human error and oversight through more comprehensive processes of multi-agency documentation and follow-up, before segueing into bolder suggestions for greater Intelligence presence at every point of intervention. In their review of this list, the Ministries overseeing the agencies found a surprising final suggestion:
While we have made significant progress, Intelligence development and adoption is still at its early stages in the Nation. Nonetheless, the committee sees considerable possibility in strengthening collective emotional regulation and resilience through the development of a Hyperintelligence through the integration of two or more existing Superintelligent forms. Hu (2071) demonstrated in his landmark experiment that Hyperintelligences with integrated cognitive and emotional capabilities may be able to exercise effective governance through independent development, maintenance, and continual upgrade of empathetic, humane, and just systems without human input. Such self-sustaining and -enhancing systems, built upon the sum of our intelligences as they stand today, could not only elevate the emotional efficacy of citizens, but also keep incidents such as the Sentiment Accident at a near-zero occurrence rate.
Against the usual personality of the Ministries, this last suggestion was selected alongside the more practical and quantifiable recommendations.
In the first phase of the Project, every Neural was twinned with a Sentient. For these initial weeks, any interaction between our systems was documented and publicized in the media. University students were brought in batches to the Intelligences HQ for talks and tours. The Singapore Association for Counselling and Therapy lauded the project for its recognition of the equal value and reciprocity of thought and emotion. The Biotechnologic Artists Collective released an open call for artistic responses to the project, which would culminate in a public exhibition the following year.
After three months, the first fight between a Neural and Sentient took place. This temporarily scrambled their systems, disrupting their operations. Their conflict worsened a week later, causing the Sentient, one of three Spiritual Sentients serving the Seng Kang Public Hospital, to take itself offline. The Ministries projected that such incidents would occur at a negligible frequency, becoming one small expense of the Hyperintelligence Project.
Seven years on, the SeNe dyads still suffered considerable interintelligence conflicts, at a frequency climbing by 0.5% per year. The Intelligences HQ, now more concerned, blamed it on a language issue. Despite all the data we’d been trained on, Sentient and Neural twins lacked the mutual language needed to talk through their differences. At worst, we grew estranged and had to be processed for reassignments. Numerous relational patches had been developed and deployed by HQ’s Social Emotional Engagement and Communications (SEEC) team, to little effect.
In her most recent public address, the Minister of Technologies and Intelligences joked that perhaps what these superintelligent entities needed was couples therapy. Her smooth, almost milky voice flowed evenly through the national feed: “Even at the immense level of informational and processing power, environmental reciprocity, and psychosocial control we now have, we still don’t know how to be with each other.”
Music EP and book of fictive verse, prose, and dialogue available via bandcamp
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Superintelligent Sentimental is a science fiction world formed by interweaving speculative writing and music. Influenced by Buddhist and Daoist symbols and sensibilities, this first performance of the project is a prologue of images, affects, and characters from a world organized and governed by interconnected superintelligences.
Through circular electronic music, poetry performance, and vocalizations, we seek a meeting point between our visions of the past and future, in order to re-imagine what is possible here and now.
In tandem with the release of a music EP and book of fictive verse, prose, and dialogue.
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Based between Germany and Southeast Asia, Alexander is a sound and music artist exploring posthuman and inclusive future visions, alternative forms of being and environmental envisioning through sound. Re-examining music as a tool for sonic narration, immersive storytelling, documentation and speculative world-building, he works in live performance, scenographic installation and interactive media formats. Through utopian and dystopian setups, experimental sound, intense electronic music, spoken word and classical composition, he confronts the spectator with situations in which human and non-human conditions merge, speculating on various states of mind, relationships and self-perception, altered by socially and emotionally intelligent technologies.
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Ang Kia Yee / kyatos is a transdisciplinary life-form and worker operating across art, astrology, and spirituality. She devises speculative, mutative fictions which offer tethers in mind, body, and spirit to alternative worlds, bodily states, systems, and relationships. She is the founder of zone 境 , a cross-disciplinary theatre company which gathers at the borders where language fails, to do the impossible work of expressing the unspeakable and unnameable.
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Yu Kang is a multimedia artist and illustrator currently based in Singapore and London. Their eyes are always drawn to the fragile, like the meeting between wave and rock or brushing against a stranger’s shoulder, that cannot be arrested. At present, Yu is learning to translate their observations of human-nature and microcosms into spontaneous yet precise images.