Ashraf Johaardien: A short meditation on what is already happening.

At my desk.
Pyjamas. 
Gown.

Coffee gone cold. I head downstairs. Put it in the microwave. Go to the bathroom. Look at myself in the mirror. Just because it’s there.

The mirror doesn’t greet me. Not yet. But I wrote a scene in my novel a few months ago in which it does. A fictional mirror that scans your vitals. Brings up your feed. Knows things about you that you haven’t told it. I wrote it as speculation. Standing here in my gown, I am less certain it was.

I go back upstairs.

The coffee is too hot now.

This is the rhythm of a working morning. Cold, hot, never quite right. The sun has moved a little further across the desk. I open the laptop and sit with the particular unease that has been following me around for a while now. One I have been trying to name.

It’s not about AI being good or bad. I have spent enough time in rooms where that argument is happening to know it’s not the argument I’m interested in. What I keep returning to is something quieter and harder to locate.

We speak as though AI arrived beside human culture. Human culture here. AI culture over there. A line between them. Us and it. But the closer I get to the machinery, the less certain that line seems.

AI has been trained on human language, images, histories, desires, prejudices, jokes, mistakes, aesthetics and accumulated knowledge. It produces material from patterns encountered there. Humans encounter what it produces. We select it, reject it, edit it, publish it, imitate it, circulate it. Some of that material becomes part of the cultural environment encountered by other people, and eventually by other systems. The movement is less a line than an exchange. Human culture into AI. AI into human culture. Human culture into AI again. I don’t think the boundary has disappeared. I think we may have been looking for it in the wrong place. Here is what I keep coming back to.

Water.

Not because AI is water. Because water gives me a way of thinking about what happens when something enters a medium that was already there. Put something into water and it is simultaneously inside the medium, altered by the medium and altering the medium. It can remain recognisable for a while. Then the boundary begins to change.

That seems closer to what is happening culturally than the line we keep trying to draw. AI didn’t arrive beside culture. It entered the medium through which culture is produced. And then its outputs entered that medium too. The question is no longer quite whether AI has entered culture. It has. The more difficult question is what happens when a culture incorporates a new operative layer before it has recognised that the incorporation has taken place.

Something can be operating before it is available for observation. The mirror doesn’t create the face. It creates the condition in which the face becomes perceptible to itself. Recognition comes after. Always after.

The mirror catches me again as I pass the bathroom later. For a second I see the room behind me, myself moving through it, the window, the door. Two rooms. One room. The same room seen twice.

We tend to imagine that recognition is also an ending. That once something is named, the naming closes it. But the condition precedes the description. It was already there.

Which means the more useful question is not when AI arrived. It’s when we noticed that it had already arrived. Those are different moments.

What I find myself wanting to say, sitting here with the third coffee of the morning, is that the most important cultural work is not to resolve the question. It’s to resist collapsing those two moments into one. To stay with the gap between the incorporation and the recognition. To ask what happened in there. What we absorbed without noticing. What we reproduced. What we amplified. What we accepted as ordinary before we had a word for it.

What we can no longer distinguish.

The morning has gone further than I thought. I close the laptop. The black screen gives me back the room. The window. The desk. My own face. A reflection of a room in which I have been sitting for hours thinking about reflections.

My daughter comes home from school and finds me still at the desk. She smells of chlorine and cold air. She has been in it all morning. She wants to go to the lake. She has decided.

We go.

And so it is. Me in the water. My arms floating next to me. My daughter on the shore, waving it’s time to go home.

I slip under.

Swim.

Ashraf Johaardien writes under the M\e. imprint. He is the Resident Writer at the Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e. Creative
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.substack.com

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