Title: Artificial Intelligence and Barbarism
Subtitle: A Critique of Digital Reason
Description: We have entered an era when AI technologies are transforming the public time of social coexistence. So far, the general public has demonstrated two opposing attitudes towards AI. Let us call the first attitude, which uncritically believes the promises of big companies that AI will improve human life, technophilia, and the opposite attitude, which denies any involvement with AI in fear of the enslavement of humans to the machine, technophobia.
It is time to open up an intermediate path in our research, which we could call technoscepticism, starting from the philosophical position of digital humanism. Digital Humanism means that at the beginning and the end of every digital system, there is the human subject, as creator, user, and signifier. Another philosophical axiom is implied, that technology is not neutral, since it entails human subjects and realizes human ethics. Technology is only understood as neutral if it is not understood as technology - but as nature.
Our intelligence is natural. And, although its manifestations are not neutral, it is in itself the primary condition for any judgment and therefore precedes its manifestations as a precondition. But AI is by definition technical. So, in the first step, AI is not intelligence, if we consider intelligence to be natural.
In the era of AI, the problem is the intensity and extension of this dominant principle in all fields of social life. The democratic problem is to overthrow the regime of mythinformation and make available to the people the data necessary for making informed political decisions. As always, the ultimate question is political: Who controls the providers of AI?
In this book, we follow the thread of AI's metaphysical claims, crossing the veil of dystopian and utopian exaggerations, to reveal the core of the novel philosophical and political problems brought about by the digital ontological revolution.
In Chapter One, we examine technoscepticism as a socio-historical critique of technology. In Chapter Two, we investigate the metaphysical foundations of AI and AGI as a scientific program. In Chapter Three, we challenge the ideology of AI as a corporate capitalist venture. In Chapter Four, we envision possible ways of overcoming digital barbarism toward a future of democratic digital humanism.
Subjects: Artificial intelligence, Digital Humanism, Technoscepticism, Technoscience, Digital Commons
People: Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997)