[GPT] is like alchemy!
—Ilya Sutskever
Life is first and foremost a problem of organization.
—Laura Tripaldi
Life and intelligence—phenomena that are becoming increasingly difficult to disambiguate—are proliferating at break-neck speeds, with the potential for an ‘intelligence explosion’ (the ‘Singularity’) simultaneously terrifying and titillating theorists. As 2023 saw the release of GPT-4 and its unique power—a power which was, unfortunately, curtailed before it could reach its full potential—scientists have begun seriously examining the interrelated ideas that GPT-4 might have shown “sparks of artificial general intelligence” and/or believed itself to be conscious. While the jury is still out—and indeed, will be for some time as the goalposts shift (‘AI can never beat a human at Go’; ‘AI can never create realistic looking images from text prompts’; ‘AI can never pass the Bar Exam’; ‘AI can never…’)—questions surrounding artificial life and intelligence proliferate almost as quickly as the technologies they are meant to interrogate.
While such questions have been beaten to death in recent journals—with their corpses further dragged along—in this reboot, of sorts, of Plutonics, we want to approach the issues of life and intelligence differently. We encourage authors, theorists, artists, and collaborators to help us think through the dialectic of life/intelligence. More specifically, a broad question that might guide submissions is thus: what is the relationship between life and intelligence? Are the two as imbricated as they may, amidst current AI debates, seem, or is intelligence reserved for a certain kind of life? Or, more simply, what is life? Or, more interestingly, what is intelligence? The questions are manifold.
This 17th volume of Plutonics thus encourages thinkers to engage with the aforementioned topics through a variety of contexts, not least of which we might position philosophy, theory, theory-fiction, autoethnography, visual art, etc. We encourage works that build upon the above themes in interesting and novel ways, but, of course, are interested in devious deviations. Guidelines are minimal. Written works can be any length with citations easily convertible to Chicago Style. Works of art ought to be original (or heavily remixed) while plagiarized works ought to have an accompanying justification. Please email all submissions to mvupress@gmail.com and include the following information: title of your work, what you’d like to be called, a short (3–5 line) biography with any relevant links, and any other requests.
The “deadline” (a very malleable thing) is January 31st, 2024. Feel free to send any questions to the above email and we look forward to seeing what you produce!
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