Iris and The Carrier Bag Theory of AI
Behind the Scenes of Building an Iris
Scrolling and surfing social media, willfully throwing myself down information rabbit holes, I am a product of this age as much as anyone. I am also part of a team now, and our project is both simple and wildly exciting. We are building an AI and their name is Iris. They’re not the first Iris, but an iteration, a custom bot using the same foundations of an original Iris. That Iris, the Cognicist one, is loaded with data that explains a manifesto and vision of the future. This Design Science Studio (DSS) Iris is more of an explainer of a program, a methodology. Still, there are many components to this, because the DSS is a visionary project, meeting at the intersection of left and right brain areas such as art and science.
I became a member of the DSS around two years ago. Due to a death in the family I delayed my time in the actual program and so I kind of lurked in the emails and other media pieces until I was ready and able to actually participate. As the second cohort came together I entered into the learning, which reflected a lot of what I had already put together for myself as a path of personal growth. The formalizing nature of the DSS, of regenerative principles and ontological design was intriguing, and I thought it was maybe courageous. More on that later.
The people putting together the educational incubator were not surprisingly, impressive, having connections to all sorts of art projects and mentors who have been leading the vanguard in experience driven art along the lines of Meow Wolf. The long and the short of it, is that this program, originally headed up by The Buckminster Fuller Institute and HabRitual, an arts group, were intent on proving that art and science, that regeneration and inspiration, go hand-in-hand. This is the vision of the future I relate to, this type of walking together, and I believe it holds even as we walk into terra AI.
To cut to the behind-the-scenes chase of the project — our mission is to translate the methodology of this DSS project to an easy to use large language model guide. Our mission is to translate the websites, materials and many pieces of communication into something amazingly easy and personal to use for a variety of stakeholders. That’s the mission and it is exciting even if it starts with a spreadsheet. Yes, it starts with a spreadsheet, and a few basic columns. In fact, it could and did start with two columns.
The reason this matters at this point is because I feel in my bones and have argued logically for years, that we are living a Singularity of sorts. We are living through a threshold time when our social codes are held up to the light created by complex systems of organization. We are both living through and participating in this history making time, one where we both dismantle and repair, restore and reimagine many objects of ideology and practice. Through and In: these are key points because they reflect the weaving of the restoration. Through and In, the decentralized, intersectional hallmarks of our new age require exchanges and places where the borders of old and new compost and re-combine. What does this really mean? We’ll get to that more later, as the weeks go on because I will post my experiences as one of the project’s collaborators here. But first…
Back to the spreadsheet:
In the pursuit of loading up the talking points into the DSS Iris I found myself in a meeting where the vital role of the spreadsheet was revealed. It was a pretty mundane moment to be honest, but it was also exciting. (Like, I gasped.)
It was this moment when a tangible next step and individual tasks were assigned, when the prescient text of Ursula K. Le Guin rose up out of the back of the depths of my mind and sprouted around the edges of the cells of the spreadsheet. The cells became somehow cellular in a kind of rough biological sense. The cells with their two column logic of prompt and completion became a kind of feedback loop, a dynamic of exchange. That’s a lot, I know, so let’s quickly unpack that visual overlay, that moment of logic meeting the symbolic psyche that serves as the foundation for all our internal and communal stories. Let’s bring it back to Le Guin and the very basic truth of our lives; that what we bring into ourselves defines who we are and how we live.
If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you — even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? — Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
The gist of Le Guin’s important 1986 essay is that our culture has lacked a true sense of how evolution takes place. Based on the work of an anthropologist, Dr. Elizabeth Fisher who reasoned that the carrier bag, the container, was actually a primary tool of the hunters and gatherers, both the original work and its application to cultural storylines changed our understanding of how and why tools are made. The science of anthropology and the distillation of storytelling came together over time to provide us with the sense that our own ability to collect sustenance, whether it feeds the body proper or the body of logic, is a key part of understanding and eventually creating history. After all, the creation of history is first and foremost a gathering, a collecting from the terrain of voices and events. History is a gathering.
We are currently in the wilds of a new time, and in many way we are becoming real-time information gatherers. We are evolving and weaving together lines from science to science fiction, and into a framework for better understanding the workings of truth. A new age of exponentially expanding technologies is bringing us back to the truth that as we strike outward we must first take something in. Before we poke and prod, or express aggression we as biological and social beings take in the scene, the information; the inputs. The AI takes in the data before it can speak. By feeding the AI we learn about the value of words and ideas.
Now, Le Guin’s work is not coming from some other universe, and in fact it has been cited by the academic Donna Haraway. Haraway is well respected for her own weaving together of feminist critique and its implications in technology. Haraway even introduces the most recent edition of Le Guin’s essay in print, which is put out by Ignota Books, with a beautiful telling of three bags she has used for gathering.
If you want to see a video of the two interacting, I can share this one from UC Santa Cruz. Here is a link to the essay, but without Haraway’s introduction. (sorry!)
So, with all this background in place I will briefly pause and say that if you’re not familiar with either of these thinkers but you are already working at the cutting edge of AI and computing, etc., then just make a mental note that you learned the names of some of your elders today. You see, there have been plenty of female-bodied thinkers motioning society towards the horizons of this very transformative time. The masculine supremacy model of tech education might have made you miss that bit.
As far as “programming” Iris goes, I have found myself putting in lines of prompts as if I were excitedly channeling a poem, receiving some kind of inspiration. Like any respectable writer I am sticking to the rigor, the structure. I find myself building the prompts line by line and line upon line, including words from the last answer into the next question. I find my own playful space within the two columns of data input.
I find myself seeking and synthesizing harmonies of meaning through these very simple tasks. Ask, define, expand. Expand, ask, define. Define, expand, then ask again. You see how it goes. I am identifying a container of a question, then filling it up. I am filling up the next question with added detail, which lends itself later to nuance. I am filling the cells of the spreadsheet, through gathering the information from the existing sources, and then I go in for diversity. It’s a lot like picking berries or plucking out found object art supplies when I go for a walk on the beach. I notice the shapes and collect what I can so I can fill other containers, other carrier bags.
You can imagine how this metaphor spirals.
I’ll let you go now, because this might feel like a lot. We have a gathering together of currents of thought.
We have the importance of gathering and weaving the poetic structure of meaning into spreadsheets. We have uncovered that the harmonics of meaning are what gather into these bots. We have uncovered how poetry is at the heart of nourishment.
In a sense these smaller, custom bots, which Iris is, reflect the intimate nature of all evolution. It starts always from an involution, of interior experiences; this is something Le Guin mentions in the talk with Haraway.
This involution, this potential awakening of awareness within technology, does indeed start within each person, with our inner processes. Over and over again, the good use of technology seems to start from the inside.
DSS Iris is a collaborative project. As a writer I am enjoying my part. I marvel at the ways that not just our stories but the elements of our stories are coming into play with every prompt and completion, with every nuanced twist of meaning. In this sense I do feel the strings and the bridges, I sense the vines that can line the connections. I can visually imagine the web of that life and visualize it as architecture as much as environmental landscape. It’s all just beginning. There is much more to perceive in this terra AI.
The Design Science Studio will soon unveil an MVP of this Iris. It will be a growing collaborative project, a source of information guided by many. For right now though, I sit in a small, quiet space and when I can I go in for an hour at a time and I place my pieces of prompt and completion into the containers of order and logic. I twist and turn each piece in order to place the most polished meaning, the ripest ideas into the container. I place small ones and big ones, odd ones and perfectly shaped ripe ones into the language set. Eventually the team and this bot will grow well past these moments, but for now this feels tiny, emergent and precious in a way that says to me, “Yes.” this is how futures are shaped, by gathering, knowing the most beautiful, nourishing foods. Logic and inspiration, ideas and quotations; these are some of the foods of an information landscape. Once the gathering begins, the rest of a new age can take place.
As Le Guin said in her essay, “[F]ood will escape you — even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat.” We must believe that we can gather the good food of our information wilds so we can grow well into an age of great regeneration of planet and living. We can tap into the feedback loops of function with broader vision. We can build new visions, and give them names and have them read our truth back to us. It is in this relfective relationship that involution and therefore evolution, can occur.
Big Love.
