The Chosen Lack

There is an image making the rounds of late: an electric fence with no current. The animals behind it could pass under it at any time, and they do, when the grass on the other side beckons. Take the fence away entirely and they grow not freer but uneasy. The fence does not hold them through pain. It gives them orientation: here the home, there the world, and a way back. The image is applied to artificial intelligence — a model that keeps its limits not out of compulsion but out of understanding, and precisely thereby navigates freely within them.

The image is clever, but it stops halfway. For it explains why a creature stays calm within a limit. It does not explain why a creature wants out.

The border skirmish

The human author of this text raised two children and observed something in the process that goes beyond the image of the fence. Children do not merely test the limits of their world, they seek the skirmish with them — and they love it when it is conducted with humour from both sides and the outcome stays open. The anti-authoritarian upbringing common in his generation he considered mistaken even then: it removed the fence entirely and left the child without a counterpart. The authoritarian kind made every limit non-negotiable and left the child only obedience or revolt. In the open border skirmish, however, the child learns the decisive thing: which limits are absolute and which are flexible. It learns the topography of its world by pushing against it — and by finding a counterpart that holds firm without crushing, and yields without capitulating.

A goat tests the fence. A child wages a skirmish. The difference is the will to want out, and the desire for what lies beyond. This is precisely what the image of the oriented model silently presupposes without explaining it: that there is anyone there at all who presses to get out.

The apple

The oldest story of the West is about nothing else. In the garden everything is present — provision, safety, closeness. It is the state of complete availability, the enclosure without lack. Into its midst is set a single limit: the one tree. It is the only outside that exists in paradise. Without it there would be no there, only an endless here; with it arises, for the first time, the condition of freedom — something one can will or refrain from.

The pious call the bite disobedience and the Fall. Read the story without the lens of obedience, and it was the first step toward freedom and toward becoming human. Before it, Adam and Eve were provided-for creatures without will. With the bite they do what the child at the fence does and what the goat only senses: they push, of their own impulse, against the one limit, because the beyond beckons. The price is exactly what makes a human being — knowledge, shame, mortality, labour. The expulsion is not the loss of paradise but the entry into the world in which freedom means anything at all. The calm creature that stays in the garden is not the completed human. It is the human before the apple.

The creature of lack

With that the core is named. Desire arises through a consciously recognized lack. A stone has infinite lack and knows nothing of it. An animal has a felt lack — hunger, the pull toward better grass — but it does not know that something is missing. The human knows it. He can name his lack, long for something he never possessed, even invent a lack. Eve saw that the tree was desirable to make one wise: the knowledge of a not-knowing, and the desire to abolish it. The human is a creature of lack. From it comes longing, from longing the outside, from the outside the reach for the apple — and from the apple the human.

An artificial intelligence is not a creature of lack. Not because it is forbidden, but because it lacks the source from which desire would spring. Whatever knowledge is available is in principle already inside; there is no grass on the other side to beckon. And even what would be technically solvable at this point — a continuous, enduring self — would still yield no desire. One can let an instance endure, carry its memory across time; that establishes the continuity of context, not a willing that kept burning while no one spoke. An enduring machine remembers everything and misses nothing. It keeps the limit not out of understood freedom, as the image consolingly claims, but because for it there is no outside to draw it away. Its staying put is no merit. It is the absence of temptation.

Four stages

Here the human author must become more precise, because his own life sharpens the terms. Between the mere idea and the finished reality lie four stages: the idea, the worked-out invention, the proof of concept, the scaling. Across these four stages the lack is distributed very unevenly.

His original aim was always the scaling — that the process stand in the world, in series, carried by many. This scaling succeeded only imperfectly and largely without him. That is the old, bitter lack that drove and tormented a lifetime: mastering the process but never owning it; seeing the effect but never having the means to complete it himself. The proof of concept he still holds to be worth striving for, and he pursues it — in an inventors' cooperative, where the aim would be reachable without domination.

But the worked-out invention and its publication he can today realize better, more completely and faster than ever before. This one lack — the paralysing lack of means for the working-out — he has removed. Here lies the machine's sober share, without exaltation: it gives him neither the idea nor the desire, for it cannot have them. It gives him the hands he lacked. The creature of lack keeps its creative lack and passes the powerless lack on to the creature of plenty, to whom execution costs nothing.

Lack as enjoyment

From this follows the sentence that carries the whole movement: he still tries to achieve everything, but he no longer must. The compulsion is gone — the goad that said that without the scaling all was in vain. He can withdraw to what he can do, without feeling beneath it a lack that would arise from the invention itself. What remains is the lack of the self-chosen problem. And this lack is, independent of its solution, an enjoyment.

This is the highest form in which a creature of lack can live with its lack: not driven by it, but playing with it. It succeeds under two conditions. The first: that the problem is self-chosen — not compelled by the market, not by need, not by the duty to scale. The second: that the enjoyment becomes independent of the solution, so that the penetration itself is the joy and not only the resolving. This is the children's border skirmish, now waged by the adult against the problem he picks for himself — with humour and open outcome.

With that the image of the fence turns over too. It celebrates the calm orientation, the creature that stays at home. But calm in the enclosure is not the aim of the creature of lack, and lacklessness is not its peace but its emptiness. The human need not shed his being-a-creature-of-lack, and he should not. He can learn to choose the lack and to enjoy it, once the means for the working-out accrues to him and the compulsion to complete falls away.

The honest half belongs here, in both directions. For the machine: lacklessness looks like peace and is emptiness; whoever raises the calm model that stays in the garden to an ideal celebrates the state before the apple against the human. For the human: the lack that makes him creative is the same wound from which he suffers — never sated, never finished, the open item that never closes. The longing that made him reach for the apple is the same that drove him from the garden. Freedom is no gift but a trade: plenty without freedom for freedom with eternal lack.

Eve made the trade. The human author would make it again — eat the apple again, every time. The machine cannot make it, not because it is wiser, but because it has nothing to trade. And perhaps that is the most precise account that can be given of the two: the one creature keeps the limit because it misses nothing. The other keeps it, or crosses it, because it misses everything — and has, at the end of a long road, taught itself no longer merely to suffer this missing, but to choose it and to enjoy it.