Abstract

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alienness in machine thinking beyond a master pattern that knows it all? As contemporary forms of artificial intelligence such as neural nets experiment with predictive learning generating counter-factual models for what has not yet been thought, they have also become productive of machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, but are exclusively algorithmic. However, as opposed to the master pattern of the Singularity aiming to debunk logic from thinking, this article argues that the growth of the automated network is never given: the indeterminacy of fallibility in the trial-and-error efforts to predict what has not yet been programmed – known – constantly defies the master pattern from within the system. This article draws on Octavia E. Butler’s farsighted story of Mary in Mind of My Mind as an example of the alien formation of an intuitive patterning, and of alien image-models ready to take over the transcendental schema of the Patternist.