#bernardstiegler — Public Fediverse posts

Im sorgenden Gespräch mit einem meiner Lieblingsdenker: #BernardStiegler … danke @[email protected] … durch die Lektüre auf deutsch tue ich mich bei den anderen Bücher, die nicht übersetzt sind, leichter …

Feine Stellungnahme in Sachen ›KI‹ von #JustinSledge. Famos, wie er als Experte u.a. für Dämonologie versteht, worum es bei Fragen der Technik geht und eine Verbindung zum französischen Philosophen #BernardStiegler zieht, mit der Frage: »Welche Art von Menschen bringen wir mit einer bestimmten Technik hervor?«

Für einen klugen #Luddismus der sich gegen entmenschlichende Maschinen-Macht wendet, nicht gegen Technik an sich.

https://youtu.be/v0VZvMmelN4

"La atención no es solo un recurso cognitivo, es una forma de poder. Quien controla tu atención, controla, en buena medida, lo que deseas, lo que temes, lo que valoras, lo que eres. Y si esa atención está siendo controlada por sistemas diseñados para maximizar el beneficio de terceros, entonces, hay un sentido real y no metafórico, en que tu libertad está comprometida."

Párrafo atribuible a Bernard Stiegler. Sacado de:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQvQ1nAeVE&t=10

#libertad #atencion #BernardStiegler #corporaciones

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…

Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).

He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“

… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.

His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.

Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.

I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:

Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]

This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]

Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…

Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…

… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.

The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.

Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:

To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]

If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]

As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]

The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.

As Max Read (scroll down) observes:

… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…

The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.

We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.

Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.

Apposite: “The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”

(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)

* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)

###

As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955.  A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere.  Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory.  His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.

source

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…

Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).

He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“

… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.

His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.

Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.

I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:

Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]

This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]

Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…

Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…

… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.

The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.

Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:

To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]

If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]

As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]

The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.

As Max Read (scroll down) observes:

… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…

The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.

We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.

Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.

Apposite: “The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”

(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)

* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)

###

As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955.  A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere.  Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory.  His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.

source

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…

Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).

He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“

… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.

His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.

Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.

I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:

Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]

This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]

Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…

Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…

… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.

The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.

Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:

To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]

If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]

As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]

The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.

As Max Read (scroll down) observes:

… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…

The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.

We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.

Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.

Apposite: “The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”

(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)

* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)

###

As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955.  A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere.  Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory.  His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.

source

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…

Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).

He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“

… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.

His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.

Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.

I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:

Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]

This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]

Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…

Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…

… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.

The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.

Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:

To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]

If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]

As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]

The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.

As Max Read (scroll down) observes:

… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…

The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.

We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.

Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.

(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)

* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)

###

As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955.  A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere.  Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory.  His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.

source

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism”*…

Further to Wednesday‘s and yesterday‘s posts (on to other topics again after this, I promise), a powerful piece from Patrick Tanguay (in his always-illuminating Sentiers newsletter).

He begins with a consideration of Peter Wolfendale’s “Geist in the machine“

… Wolfendale argues that the current AI debate recapitulates an 18th-century conflict between mechanism and romanticism. On one side, naive rationalists (Yudkowsky, Bostrom, much of Silicon Valley) assume intelligence is ultimately reducible to calculation; throw enough computing power at the problem and the gap between human and machine closes. On the other, popular romantics (Bender, Noë, many artists) insist that something about human cognition, whether it’s embodiment, meaning, or consciousness, can never be mechanised. Wolfendale finds both positions insufficient. The rationalists reduce difficult choices to optimisation problems, while the romantics bundle distinct capacities into a single vague essence.

His alternative draws on Kant and Hegel. He separates what we loosely call the “soul” into three capacities: wisdom (the metacognitive ability to reformulate problems, not just solve them), creativity (the ability to invent new rules rather than search through existing ones), and autonomy (the capacity to question and revise our own motivations). Current AI systems show glimmers of the first two but lack the third entirely. Wolfendale treats autonomy as the defining feature of personhood: not a hidden essence steering action, but the ongoing process of asking who we want to be and revising our commitments accordingly. Following Hegel he calls this Geist, spirit as self-reflective freedom.

Wolfendale doesn’t ask whether machines can have souls; he argues we should build them, and that the greater risk lies in not doing so. Machines that handle all our meaningful choices without possessing genuine autonomy would sever us from the communities of mutual recognition through which we pursue truth, beauty, and justice. A perfectly optimised servant that satisfies our preferences while leaving us unchanged is, in his phrase, “a slave so abject it masters us.” Most philosophical treatments of AI consciousness end with a verdict on possibility. Wolfendale ends with an ethical imperative: freedom is best preserved by extending it.

I can’t say I agree, unless “we”… end up with a completely different relationship to our technology and capital. However, his argument all the way before then is a worthy reflection, and pairs well with the one below and another from issue No.387. I’m talking about Anil Seth’s The mythology of conscious AI, where he argues that consciousness probably requires biological life and that silicon-based AI is unlikely to achieve it. Seth maps the biological terrain that makes consciousness hard to replicate; Wolfendale maps the philosophical terrain that makes personhood worth pursuing anyway, on entirely different grounds. Seth ends where the interesting problem begins for Wolfendale: even if machines can’t be conscious, the question of whether they can be autonomous persons, capable of self-reflective revision, remains open:

Though GenAI systems can’t usually compete with human creatives on their own, they are increasingly being used as imaginative prosthetics. This symbiosis reveals that what distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty. What makes our imaginative processes conscious is our ability to self-consciously intervene in them, deliberately making unusual choices or drawing analogies between disparate tasks. And yet metacognition is nothing on its own. If reason demands revision, new rules must come from somewhere. […]

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. He claims that this wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. Dreyfus argues that, without bodies and needs, machines will never match us. […]

This is the basic link between self-determination and self-justification. For Hegel, to be free isn’t simply to be oneself – it isn’t enough to play by one’s own rules. We must also be responsive to error, ensuring not just that inconsistencies in our principles and practices are resolved, but that we build frameworks to hold one another mutually accountable. […]

Delegating all our choices to mere automatons risks alienating us from our sources of meaning. If we consume only media optimised for our personal preferences, generated by AIs with no preferences of their own, then we will cease to belong to aesthetic communities in which tastes are assessed, challenged and deepened. We will no longer see ourselves and one another as even passively involved in the pursuit of beauty. Without mutual recognition in science and civic life, we might as easily be estranged from truth and right – told how to think and act by anonymous machines rather than experts we hold to account…

Tanguay then turns to “The Prospect of Butlerian Jihad” by Liam Mullally, in which Mullally uses…

… Herbert’s Dune and the Butlerian Jihad [here] as a lens for what he sees as a growing anti-tech “structure of feeling” (Raymond Williams’s term): the diffuse public unease about AI, enshittification, surveillance, and tech oligarchs that has not yet solidified into coherent politics. The closest thing to a political expression so far is neo-Luddism, which Mullally credits for drawing attention to technological exploitation but finds insufficient. His concern is that the impulse to reject technology wholesale smuggles in essentialist assumptions about human nature, a romantic defence of “pure” humanity against the corruption of machines. He traces this logic back to Samuel Butler’s 1863 essay Darwin Among the Machines, which framed the human-technology relationship as a zero-sum contest for supremacy, and notes that Butler’s framing was “explicitly supremacist,” written from within colonial New Zealand and structured by the same logic of domination it claimed to resist.

The alternative Mullally proposes draws on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “originary technicity”: the idea that human subjectivity has always been constituted in part by its tools, that there is no pre-technological human to defend. [see here] If that’s right, then opposing technology as such is an “ontological confusion,” a fight against something that is already part of what we are. The real problem is not machines but the economic logic that shapes their development and deployment. Mullally is clear-eyed about this: capital does not have total command over its technologies, and understanding how they work is a precondition for contesting them. He closes by arguing that the anti-tech structure of feeling is “there for the taking,” but only if it can be redirected. The fights ahead are between capital and whatever coalition can form against it, not between humanity and machines. Technology is a terrain in that conflict; abandoning it means losing before the contest begins.

Wolfendale’s Geist in the Machine above arrived at a parallel conclusion from a different direction: where Mullally argues that rejecting technology means defending a false vision of the human, Wolfendale argues that refusing to extend autonomy to machines risks severing us from the self-reflective freedom that makes us persons in the first place. Both reject the romantic position, but for different reasons:

To the extent that neo-Luddites bring critical attention to technology, they are doing useful work. But this anti-tech sentiment frequently cohabitates with something uneasy: the treatment of technology as some abstract and impenetrable evil, and the retreat, against this, into essentialist views of the human. […]

If “humanity” is not a thing-in-itself, but historically, socially and technically mutable, then the sphere of possibility of the human and of our world becomes much broader. Our relationship to the non-human — to technology or to nature — does not need to be one of control, domination and exploitation. […]

As calls for a fight back against technology grow, the left needs to carefully consider what it is advocating for. Are we fighting the exploitation of workers, the hollowing out of culture and the destruction of the earth via technology, or are we rallying in defence of false visions of pure, a-technical humanity? […]

The anti-tech structure of feeling is there for the taking. But if it is to lead anywhere, it must be taken carefully: a fightback against technological exploitation will be found not in the complete rejection of technology, but in the short-circuiting of one kind of technology and the development of another.

As Max Read (scroll down) observes:

… if we understand A.I. as a product of the systems that precede it, I think it’s fair to say ubiquitous A.I.-generated text is “inevitable” in the same way that high-volume blogs were “inevitable” or Facebook fake news pages were “inevitable”: Not because of some “natural” superiority or excellence, but because they follow so directly from the logic of the system out of which they emerge. In this sense A.I. is “inevitable” precisely because it’s not revolutionary…

The question isn’t if we want a relationship with technology; it’s what kind of relationship we want. We’ve always (at least since we’ve been a conscious species) co-existed with, and been shaped by, tools; we’ve always suffered the “friction” of technological transition as we innovate new tools. As yesterday’s post suggested (in its defense of the open web in the face on a voracious attack from powerful LLM companies), “what matters is power“… power to shape the relationship(s) we have with the technologies we use. That power is currently in the hands of a relatively few companies, all concerned above all else with harvesting as much money as they can from “uses” they design to amplify that engagement and ease that monetization. It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way.

We’ve lived under modern capitalism for only a few hundred years, and under the hyper-global, hyper-extractive regime we currently inhabit for only a century-and-a-half or so, during which time, in fits and starts, it has grown ever more rapcious. George Monbiot observed that “like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good.” And Ursula Le Guin, that “we live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” In many countries, “divine right” monarchy has been replaced by “constitutional monarchy.” Perhaps it’s time for more of the world to consider “constitutional capitalism.” We could start by learning from the successes and failures of Scandinavia and Europe.

Social media, AI, quantum computing– on being clear as to the real issue: “Geist in the machine & The prospect of Butlerian Jihad,” from @inevernu.bsky.social.

(All this said, David Chalmers argues that there’s one possibility that might change everything: “Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?” On the other hand, the ARC Prize Foundation suggests, we have some time: a test they devised for benchmarking agentic intelligence recently found that “humans can solve 100% of the environments, in contrast to frontier AI systems which, as of March 2026, score below 1%”… :)

* Ted Chiang (gift article; see also here and here and here)

###

As we keep our eyes on the prize, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with a version of these same issues in the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955.  A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere.  Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory.  His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.

source

dass eine nicht-unmenschliche Menschheit sich – durch die Agitationen dieser verrückten und hypermächtigen Marionette – mit ihrer eigenen Hybris konfrontiert sieht.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

als datenwissenschaftlicher Philistertum eines absoluten Nichtwissens – ist etwas, worüber wir uns in jeder erdenklichen Weise Sorgen machen sollten, …« 2/2 #BernardStiegler: »L' immense régression«

und ihn ständig neu herzustellen, für ihn Sorge zu tragen, ihn zu pflegen und zu schützen …« 2/2 #BernardStiegler »The Age of Disruption«

dann leide ich nicht nur deshalb, weil sie mir Leid zufügen. Ich leide auch mit ihnen unter dem, was ihnen Leid zufügt.« 4/4 #BernardStiegler

Tragisch ist diese Wahl vor allem in dem Sinne, dass sich eine Nicht-Unmenschlichkeit, konfrontiert – durch die Agitationen dieser wahnsinnigen und zugleich hypermächtigen Marionette – mit ihrer eigenen Hybris wiederfindet.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler: »The Immense Regression«

Wenn wir nach dem Antichrist suchen müssten, würden wir ihn eher in dieser hinter der Marionette versteckten Figur finden als in der Marionette selbst.« 3/3 #BernardStiegler: »The Immense Regression«

»Was sich heute durchsetzt, läuft auf eine totale Proletarisierung hinaus – auf eine allgemeine Entmächtigung des Denkens selbst. Sie vollzieht sich zwar unter der Präsidentschaft von Donald Trump, aber nicht von ihm orchestriert. Machen wir diesen Kretin nicht zum Sündenbock.« #BernardStiegler

und zwar auf der Grundlage des libertären Diskurses von Peter Thiel und des Akzelerationisten Nick Land.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler »The Immense Regression«

Und da Donald Trump sie, nachdem sie bereits der Motor seines Wahlkampfes gewesen waren, zum Kern seiner Politik gemacht hat, sind sie zu den grellsten Symptomen dieser geistigen Wüste geworden …« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

sowie durch die Delegation lokaler Legitimationsprozesse an Anbieter, die zwar völlig korrupt sein mögen, zugleich aber Experten der „Post-Truth“ sind – das heißt der automatisierten Ausbeutung mimetischen Begehrens. Genau dies wird gegenwärtig eingerichtet.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

Sie benötigen dies sogar und entwickeln darüber hinaus bereits die entsprechenden integrierten … Dienste und Organe …« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

Ironie des Schicksals – ausgerechnet 1989 … „Die Vollendung des Nihilismus als postfaktisches, rechnerisch-algorithmisches Gestell ist zugleich das Auftreten von Präsident Trump, dessen exemplarische Toxizität und extreme Gefährlichkeit bereits Guattari 1989 erkannt hat.“ #BernardStiegler

»Was heute herrscht, ist eine totale Proletarisierung, das heißt eine generalisierte Denoetisierung – präsidiert von Donald Trump, aber nicht von ihm orchestriert: Machen wir diesen Kretin nicht zum Sündenbock.« #BernardStiegler (er hat Trump II nicht mehr erlebt) …

sich in Gang setzen, um dem entgegenzutreten, was sie bedroht – einem beispiellosen politischen und sozialen Zusammenbruch.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

Para conhecer a obra Bernard Stiegler

https://outraspalavras.net/historia-e-memoria/para-conhecer-a-obra-bernard-stiegler/

Para conhecer a obra Bernard Stiegler

https://outraspalavras.net/historia-e-memoria/para-conhecer-a-obra-bernard-stiegler/

Para conhecer a obra Bernard Stiegler

https://outraspalavras.net/historia-e-memoria/para-conhecer-a-obra-bernard-stiegler/

Para conhecer a obra Bernard Stiegler

https://outraspalavras.net/historia-e-memoria/para-conhecer-a-obra-bernard-stiegler/

Para conhecer a obra Bernard Stiegler

https://outraspalavras.net/historia-e-memoria/para-conhecer-a-obra-bernard-stiegler/

Kaum jemand hat die Bedrohung der Demokratie durch die Telekratie in den Händen antidemokratischer Oligarchen besser beschrieben als #BernardStiegler. Er diagnostiziert eine »global attention deficit disorder - verursacht durch Psychotechnologien, die durch keine polit. Macht reguliert werden. 1/2

Logic of the Thicket and the Unsearchable Web

There is a particular kind of stillness found in the villa overlooking the Giardino all’italiana, a silence that is less about the absence of noise and more about the absolute presence of a plan. Standing upon a belvedere in the sixteenth century, one did not merely look at nature; one looked through a specific geometry that had already decided what nature was allowed to be. Leon Battista Alberti and Niccolò Tribolo did not view the wild landscape as an entity to be met, but as a rough draft to be corrected. The axial symmetry, the squares, and the circles of the Renaissance garden were not merely aesthetic choices; they were the visual grammar of a new kind of mastery. The medieval walls of the hortus conclusus fell away, not to invite the wilderness in, but to expand the reach of the human eye, establishing a panoramic viewpoint where the owner sat as the rational conductor of the visible world.

It is difficult not to notice how this impulse to map and master—to treat the organic as a design scheme—has slowly migrated from the soil into the fabric of human relation. What began as the pruning of a hedge eventually became the pruning of the social universe. One senses this lineage in the early twentieth century, when the sociogram first began to translate the messy, opaque attractions between people into the clean lines of nodes and links. Jacob L. Moreno’s belief that we could re-engineer social life through these visualizations mirrors the Renaissance gardener’s conviction that an unruly vine is simply a line that has lost its way. We began to treat the human spirit as a series of vertices and edges, a conceptual apparatus that promised to prevent social disorder by making every connection visible, measurable, and, ultimately, manageable.

This terraforming instinct has a way of smoothing out the world until it becomes a mirror. When Henri de Saint-Simon conceptualized society as a network where resources flowed like blood to reach equilibrium, he was drafting the blueprint for a mechanical harmony. Yet, as Henri Bergson would later observe, this drive toward a perfect mechanism often results in a certain uniformity of things—a state where humanity ceases to climb toward diversity and instead settles into a rhythmic, predictable stasis.

One might see this most clearly in the way we have come to treat the global digital ecosystem, which functions with the quiet, devastating efficiency of a pesticide. A pesticide is remarkable because it is effective everywhere; it operates on a biological structure that it assumes to be universal. But in its success, it betrays an indifference to locality. It ignores the specific alchemy of the soil, the peculiar behavior of the local insect, and the necessary shadows that allow a system to breathe. Our centralized platforms operate on this same logic of the universal standard. They apply a single, closed grammar of interaction to the entire globe, acting as a chemical wash that removes the noodiversity—the thick, varied textures of thought—required for a culture to sustain its own weight.

We find ourselves in a race toward an automated general intelligence, a fantasy of efficiency that finds its most intimate expression in the large language model. This model begins to resemble a probabilistic belvedere—a panoramic viewpoint not over physical terrain, but over the sum of our recorded expression. By ingesting the vast, unkempt archives of global culture, it offers back a statistical mean, a smooth and authoritative consensus that prunes the idiosyncratic and the jagged until only the most probable remains. If our thoughts are shaped by this statistical average, we lose the technodiversity required to maintain different ways of being in the world. The danger is not that the machine mimics us, but that we begin to inhabit its statistical center, trading the difficult work of dwelling in our own perspective for the ease of an automated, uniform prose. We are left with a social atomism where the individual is no longer a person in a place, but a social atom vibrating within a pre-programmed apparatus. The platforms we inhabit have become exhausted because they are structurally incapable of fostering anything but disindividuation. They chop attention into marketable fragments—short cries for notice—leaving no room for a collective projectuality that might actually endure.

What emerges instead is the possibility of the digital garden, a material practice of collective individuation. It begins to resemble something closer to Gilbert Simondon’s vision, where the individual and the collective are not opposing forces but a constant, transforming process. A digital garden is less a profile and more a dwelling; it is a space where one does not merely update a status but coordinates and produces data. By moving away from the walled enclosures of the social graph and toward open standards and linked data, we transition from being passive nodes to active participants in a transindividual reality. It is a shift from connectivity—the mere touching of wires—to a more profound sense of inhabiting the information we create.

Cultivating this diversity is perhaps the only way to push back against the homogenizing forces that have been accelerating since the industrial age. Biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity are not separate concerns but a single, tangled knot. If our technologies remain uniform, our actions upon the Earth will remain uniform, leading to a predictable kind of collapse. To resist this, we might need to embrace what could be called planetary thinking—an acknowledgement that we inhabit the earth as diverse peoples coexisting with non-human beings, plants, and the elements.

This requires a cosmotechnics that is bespoke and localized, a recovery of the relationship between the technical tool and the cosmic order it inhabits. What begins to emerge is a sense of terroir for the digital, where the architecture of a network might reflect the specific ancestral rhythms or local moralities of the community that tends it. We might find that the tools we build are not merely instruments of utility but modes of orientation, helping us find our place within a wider world rather than attempting to conquer it. This re-enchantment of the tool moves us away from the cold, industrial universalism of the “global” and toward a variety of local cosmotechnics that align with the specific spirit of the soil.

Ultimately, the metaphor of the garden begins to feel too brittle, its walls too high to allow for the kind of life we now require. The Renaissance garden was, at its heart, a space of enclosure designed to keep the plague of the outside world at bay, yet today the plague is the enclosure itself; it is the very uniformity that was once our pride. To step away from the belvedere is to complete the descent from sight into touch, moving from the panoramic mastery of the graph toward a mode of navigation that relies on the immediate texture of the undergrowth. In this digital forest, we find the quiet virtue of opacity—a space where the individual is not fully mapped or categorized, but allowed to remain partially in shadow, away from the gardener’s eye. The silence of the statistical mean begins to give way to a different kind of sound, a generative noise that resembles the rustle of a distributed reasoning rather than the hum of a server. It is a state of being that is less about reaching a destination and more about the persistent effort of dwelling, where one might plant a single, idiosyncratic seed that the model cannot predict, watching as it takes its own stubborn shape in the dark.

Coda: A Lineage of Shadows

To navigate this landscape is to encounter the echoes of those who first sensed the limits of the enclosure. One cannot speak of the descent into the forest without Gilbert Simondon, for whom the individual was never a fixed substance but a phase of being, a process of becoming that carries with it a pre-individual charge. His refusal of the hylemorphic schema—of form merely imposed upon matter—finds a contemporary resonance in Yuk Hui, whose concepts of cosmotechnics and technodiversity remind us that the machine and the moral order were once, and must again be, a single tangled knot. We feel here, too, the weight of Bernard Stiegler’s pharmakon, that dual nature of technology as both the poison of disindividuation and the potential cure for a new collective life.

The architecture of our current enclosures has its own long history, a lineage of mastery stretching from Pliny the Younger’s classical retreats to Alberti’s axial gardens, and into the modern social physics of Auguste Comte and Saint-Simon. The clean lines of our social graphs trace a direct path back to the institutional maps of Jacob L. Moreno, who first thought to fix the human spirit into the static geometry of nodes and links. Against this “enframing,” as Heidegger might have termed it—the reduction of the world to a standing reserve—one finds an alternative in the immanence of Spinoza and the multiplicities of Deleuze, thinkers who saw the individual as a relation of forces rather than a solitary atom.

The possibility of a different web—a distributed reasoning machine—owes its spirit to the early visions of Tim Berners-Lee and the cybernetic distinctions of Norbert Wiener, alongside the contemporary critiques of Geert Lovink and the swarm-logics of Rick Falkvinge. We are reminded by Foucault of the quiet power of documentation to fix us in place, and by Marx of the deep alienation that occurs when we are severed from our collective potential. Throughout these reflections, these voices serve not as definitive authorities, but as orientations—the markers on a trail that is still being blazed, reminding us that to dwell is to participate in a reality that is always, stubbornly, in the process of becoming.

Hat tip to the wonderful thinkers in the Contraptions Book Club for seeding these ideas.

#BernardStiegler #CollectiveIndividuation #Cosmotechnics #DigitalGarden #DigitalTerroir #DistributedReasoning #GilbertSimondon #JacobLMoreno #LargeLanguageModels #Noodiversity #Opacity #OpenStandards #PlanetaryThinking #RenaissanceGardens #SocialGraph #Sociometry #Technodiversity #TheUnsearchableWeb #YukHui

andererseits in den Griff zu bekommen. … Die Zerstörung des Sorge-Systems führt zur Liquidation der demokratischen Mündigkeit als demokratischer Verantwortung: Sie führt zum Populismus.« 3/3 #BernardStiegler

In diesem Kontext gilt es, im Namen der Intelligenz vor allem gegen jene zu kämpfen, die diese neue Form der verantwortungslosen Unmündigkeit als Organisatoren der Regression verbreiten.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

machen aber zugleich die Familien und das Erziehungssystem für diesen Niedergang verantwortlich. Diese Sorglosigkeit ist der wesentliche Grund für die extreme Schwächung der Erziehungseinrichtungen wie auch der Familienstrukturen.« 2/2 #BernardStiegler

Grundvoraussetzung ist jedoch, daß das symbolische industrielle Milieu, in dem Kinder und Heranwachsende, aber auch ihre Eltern und ihre Lehrer leben, die Bildung einer rationalen und kritischen Aufmerksamkeit nicht systematisch behindert." #BernardStiegler

aus denen eine zivile und zivilisierte Gesellschaft besteht. Letztendlich besteht sie darin, die Demokratie zu retten, indem man sie entsprechend den Anforderungen neu erfindet, die durch organologische und psychotechnologische Entwicklungen verursacht worden sind. 3/3 #BernardStiegler

sondern über das Marketing …. In diesem Kontext gilt es, im Namen der Intelligenz vor allem gegen jene zu kämpfen, die diese neue Form der verantwortungslosen Unmündigkeit als Organisatoren der Regression verbreiten.« 3/3 #BernardStiegler über Meta, TikTok & Co. als Organisatoren der Regression

„Will man eine »Schlacht für die Intelligenz« führen, hat sie folgendermaßen zu beginnen: Es gilt, die Bildung organologisch zu reformieren – die psychosoziale Aufmerksamkeit im Zeitalter der globalisierten Psychotechnologien und Psychomacht wiederherzustellen." #BernardStiegler

Abbiamo bisogno di spazi di attenzione condivisa #bernardstiegler #filosofia #philosophy
https://open.substack.com/pub/francescoori/p/gli-spazi-di-attenzione-condivisa?r=6e5ra&utm_medium=ios

Abbiamo bisogno di spazi di attenzione condivisa #bernardstiegler #filosofia #philosophy
https://open.substack.com/pub/francescoori/p/gli-spazi-di-attenzione-condivisa?r=6e5ra&utm_medium=ios

Abbiamo bisogno di spazi di attenzione condivisa #bernardstiegler #filosofia #philosophy
https://open.substack.com/pub/francescoori/p/gli-spazi-di-attenzione-condivisa?r=6e5ra&utm_medium=ios

Abbiamo bisogno di spazi di attenzione condivisa #bernardstiegler #filosofia #philosophy
https://open.substack.com/pub/francescoori/p/gli-spazi-di-attenzione-condivisa?r=6e5ra&utm_medium=ios

Abbiamo bisogno di spazi di attenzione condivisa #bernardstiegler #filosofia #philosophy
https://open.substack.com/pub/francescoori/p/gli-spazi-di-attenzione-condivisa?r=6e5ra&utm_medium=ios

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

"AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers" https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-illiterate-programmers

This is #proletarization, in the stieglerian sense, in a very pure form: loosing your knowledge to a technical object or process.

#BernardStiegler also gives a name to what happens when we leave our know-how to a technology, and when the ones in control of that technology do not care – in other ways than in terms of profit – about the ones trusting it: #SystemicStupidity

#AI #programming #PhilosophyOfTechnology

The discussion of the ‘so called Covid crisis’ which was ‘not a health crisis at all’ kicks in at 17 minutes 👇 I found this really grim, though quite thought-provoking on how the sophisticated conceptual vocabulary of philosophy of technology can co-exist with the crude vocabulary of ‘false science’, ‘scams’ and ‘criminality’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBS_l5mSf30&t=1s

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/disillusioned-awakenings-in-dark-times-reading-bernard-stiegler-after-the-covid-event/

#BernardStiegler #conspiracism #conspiracyTheorising #covid #PieterLemmens

The discussion of the ‘so called Covid crisis’ which was ‘not a health crisis at all’ kicks in at 17 minutes 👇 I found this really grim, though quite thought-provoking on how the sophisticated conceptual vocabulary of philosophy of technology can co-exist with the crude vocabulary of ‘false science’, ‘scams’ and ‘criminality’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBS_l5mSf30&t=1s

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/disillusioned-awakenings-in-dark-times-reading-bernard-stiegler-after-the-covid-event/

#BernardStiegler #conspiracism #conspiracyTheorising #covid #PieterLemmens

I extracted my Kindle highlights and notes from Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident and shared it in the context of an ongoing conversation about LLMs. Here are Claude’s suggestions for questions which could link Stiegler’s work to the investigation:

• Reflexivity and the technical mediation of knowledge: In your conversations, you’ve discussed the importance of reflexivity in engaging with knowledge and technology. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about anamnesis and hypomnesis, and how technical objects mediate our relationship to knowledge. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of hypomnesis relate to our discussion about the reflexive use of LLMs in knowledge production and academic work?
• The phenomenology of relevance: You’ve discussed the “feel of an idea” and how certain concepts or texts become relevant at different times. This connects with Stiegler’s thoughts on temporal objects and how we engage with knowledge over time. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about temporal objects and retention help us understand the phenomenology of relevance we’ve been discussing?
• Proletarianization and the loss of knowledge: You’ve touched on the idea of proletarianization in relation to LLMs and the potential loss of certain forms of knowledge or skills. This directly relates to Stiegler’s concerns about the industrialization of memory and consciousness. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of proletarianization apply to our current moment with LLMs? Are there ways to use these technologies that resist proletarianization?
• The fuzzy nature of knowledge and LLMs: You’ve discussed the “fuzzy” nature of LLM outputs and how this challenges our preference for exactitude. This relates to Stiegler’s thoughts on the industrialization of memory and the synchronization of consciousness. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about synchronization and diachrony help us think about the “fuzzy” knowledge produced by LLMs?
• Creativity, iteration, and technical objects: Your discussions have touched on creativity, iteration, and how we relate to technical objects. This connects with Stiegler’s ideas about individuation and the relationship between humans and technical objects. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of individuation help us understand the creative potential of human-LLM interactions?
• The transmission of knowledge across generations: You’ve discussed the importance of transmitting knowledge and the potential risks of losing certain forms of knowledge. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about epiphylogenesis and the accumulation of cultural knowledge. Bold: How might Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis inform our thinking about the role of LLMs in knowledge transmission and preservation?
• The emotional and psychic life of knowledge: Your recent suggestion to read “The Madness of Knowledge” connects with Stiegler’s interest in the psychological and emotional aspects of our relationship to knowledge and technical objects. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about psychic and collective individuation inform our understanding of the emotional life of knowledge in the age of LLMs?
• The changing nature of writing and thinking: You’ve discussed how LLMs might change our processes of writing and thinking. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about how technical objects shape our cognitive processes. Bold: How does Stiegler’s analysis of writing and other mnemotechnics help us understand the potential impact of LLMs on our writing and thinking processes?

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/an-example-of-using-claude-to-ask-questions-from-kindle-highlights-and-notes/

#BernardStiegler #claude #notetaking #philosophyOfTechnology #Thinking

I extracted my Kindle highlights and notes from Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident and shared it in the context of an ongoing conversation about LLMs. Here are Claude’s suggestions for questions which could link Stiegler’s work to the investigation:

• Reflexivity and the technical mediation of knowledge: In your conversations, you’ve discussed the importance of reflexivity in engaging with knowledge and technology. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about anamnesis and hypomnesis, and how technical objects mediate our relationship to knowledge. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of hypomnesis relate to our discussion about the reflexive use of LLMs in knowledge production and academic work?
• The phenomenology of relevance: You’ve discussed the “feel of an idea” and how certain concepts or texts become relevant at different times. This connects with Stiegler’s thoughts on temporal objects and how we engage with knowledge over time. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about temporal objects and retention help us understand the phenomenology of relevance we’ve been discussing?
• Proletarianization and the loss of knowledge: You’ve touched on the idea of proletarianization in relation to LLMs and the potential loss of certain forms of knowledge or skills. This directly relates to Stiegler’s concerns about the industrialization of memory and consciousness. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of proletarianization apply to our current moment with LLMs? Are there ways to use these technologies that resist proletarianization?
• The fuzzy nature of knowledge and LLMs: You’ve discussed the “fuzzy” nature of LLM outputs and how this challenges our preference for exactitude. This relates to Stiegler’s thoughts on the industrialization of memory and the synchronization of consciousness. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about synchronization and diachrony help us think about the “fuzzy” knowledge produced by LLMs?
• Creativity, iteration, and technical objects: Your discussions have touched on creativity, iteration, and how we relate to technical objects. This connects with Stiegler’s ideas about individuation and the relationship between humans and technical objects. Bold: How does Stiegler’s concept of individuation help us understand the creative potential of human-LLM interactions?
• The transmission of knowledge across generations: You’ve discussed the importance of transmitting knowledge and the potential risks of losing certain forms of knowledge. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about epiphylogenesis and the accumulation of cultural knowledge. Bold: How might Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenesis inform our thinking about the role of LLMs in knowledge transmission and preservation?
• The emotional and psychic life of knowledge: Your recent suggestion to read “The Madness of Knowledge” connects with Stiegler’s interest in the psychological and emotional aspects of our relationship to knowledge and technical objects. Bold: How might Stiegler’s ideas about psychic and collective individuation inform our understanding of the emotional life of knowledge in the age of LLMs?
• The changing nature of writing and thinking: You’ve discussed how LLMs might change our processes of writing and thinking. This relates to Stiegler’s ideas about how technical objects shape our cognitive processes. Bold: How does Stiegler’s analysis of writing and other mnemotechnics help us understand the potential impact of LLMs on our writing and thinking processes?

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/09/15/an-example-of-using-claude-to-ask-questions-from-kindle-highlights-and-notes/

#BernardStiegler #claude #notetaking #philosophyOfTechnology #Thinking

Panser le devenir des savoirs dans le milieu numérique

Cet ouvrage est une introduction à la pensée de Bernard Stiegler, présentée sous différents angles par 17 auteurs.

#stiegler #bernardStiegler #philosophie #philo #philosophy #intersciences #organologie #organologieGénérale #technique #société #politique

#vendredilecture
https://www.lespressesdureel.com/ouvrage.php?id=11380&menu=0