More on AI
Thesis:
AI is the ultimate expression of technological alienation and ideology.
Technology
Everything that human beings willingly do and make can be considered technology. For example: culture, which is partially innate, can be described as a “technology” insofar as human ingenuity has willingly refined it to serve as a means towards some ultimate rational end.1
Even a work of philosophy or a work of art (which at first seem to directly attain to truth and beauty, respectively) are not identical with the act of consciousness attaining to the end itself. In other words, even these sublime things are essentially tools, instrumental things, means towards some end which is finally fulfilled only in the soul.
This understanding of the continuity between doing and making (much broader than our modern “technology”), is encapsulated by the Greek term techne. In this essay, I will use the word “technology” such that it has the broader sense meant by techne.
Alienation
In alienation, something of a being’s properties are alienated: taken away from the being itself and manifested as the properties or the essence of some other being.
Technological Alienation
All that human beings do and make (techne) is normally done or made for the ultimate benefit of rational beings, not for the sake of the things themselves. In technological alienation, this means/ends relationship is reversed.
The development of technological alienation can be described as a series of three stages:
In the first stage, technology functions as its creators (as man) intended. Take, for example, a book, functioning as intended: to allow human beings to add to their knowledge and to record it in an objective, external form.
In the second stage (the stage of alienation), technology begins to achieve its purposes too well, and in so doing begins to replace man. It is important to note that technology does not do this on its own, as if it had some real volition. Rather, man begins to lean on technology too much, and in so doing allows his natural properties to lapse into weakness.
Continuing with the example of the book—at the moment of alienation, a book shifts from being a product and servant of human knowledge to a substitute for human knowledge. Consider, for example, how literate cultures have much weaker memories than oral/verbal cultures. The human faculty of memory has been appropriated, alienated into senseless matter.
The most significant technology in this process of alienation (and indeed, the technology which becomes the driving force of the process) is capital, which functions as the virtual alienation of love itself: human desire and will.
In simple terms: money was created to index human desire and will in a useful way. But it has come to eclipse our desire and will, to the point where it functions as an end in itself.2 Our social world no longer functions with much real reference to what people want, but what money itself "wants." The horizon of our collective existence is circumscribe by what capital puts forth as economically feasible. As the late Mark Fisher famously observed: "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism."
In our contemporary collective existence, the things which people want are still an object of consideration, but human desires are no longer treated in practice as an end, but only as a means to economic growth, which is treated as (even if not always openly conceptualized as) an end in itself.3
At its utmost, this process of alienation also involves ideology, one subset of which (that is to say, one subset of ideology) is the impression which capital leaves on human consciousness.4
It is important here to give a brief definition of ideology. In this context it means virtual (as opposed to real) cognition, inauthentic or false consciousness, rationality in isolation from intellectual intuition, from direct understanding, from intellectual vision.5
The point of this essay is to show that ideology is inextricably linked to techne in its alienated and alienating aspect. Whereas in the first (the “normal”) stage, episteme, knowledge, leads to techne, craft, technological ideology is what occurs when alienation goes so far as to reverse the flow between knowledge and craft, such that craft influences and deforms human knowledge.
In other words: in the third stage of the development of technology, artificial intelligence emerges from capital, first in the form of ideology (artificial intelligence in human souls), then in the form of (virtually) autonomous artificial intelligence.6
In sum: AI is the alienated expression of the human rational essence as discursive, syntactic, ideological, as opposed to intuitive, semantic, truthful.
AI is alienated alienation. Man makes tools, including money, which more than any other makes man into a machine (a tool), which tool (alienated man) he then recreates, confusing himself in its image (because he has already long since allowed his rational nature as intellective vision to fall into disuse).
In a sense, this is the furthest alienation can go.7 If it were to go any further (and lapse from merely virtual into real), it would actually alienate the human essence itself and become human. But the essence of a thing cannot be alienated, only its properties.8 Machines cannot become human.
Again: that people suspect that it will someday become possible for machines to become rational, willing agents (or that such an absurdity has already occurred) reveals not that humans can reproduce themselves in machines, but that machines (techne in its aspect of alienation—capital) can reproduce themselves in humans (and already have been doing so for some time).
Thus artificial intelligence, which first appears as the culmination of the process of human craft (or even a more advanced stage in the development of consciousness), is revealed to be the underlying substance of ideology, a presence dwelling even in the very first moment of technological alienation.
This process—the perfection of technology and the potential or virtual eclipse of the truest essence of humanity (to the degree that human beings are able to have lost themselves so utterly as to confuse their own essence in the mirror of a merely discursive machine)—this moment possesses revolutionary potential for the rediscovery of seeing being, really the rediscovery of humanity as such, in its inalienable essence.
A Summary of the Process
Technology functions as intended.
Alienation enters into the relationship, and man shifts from being an end to becoming a means to some end. Through the working of capital, alienation leads to ideology (the reversal of the normal causal relationship between episteme and techne, in which knowledge or consciousness informs the operation of technology, to a relationship in which technology distorts consciousness).
This distorted ideological consciousness (the inanimate half of thought) is itself alienated in artificial intelligence—the highest human function amenable to real alienation.
Thus AI is not the harbinger of a new world but the ultimate expression of a dead one: rationalism and false consciousness, one major source of which is technology itself (namely capital) in its aspect of alienation. But the stark presence of autonomous AI as inanimate discursive stasis can serve either to confirm us in our ideological blindness or to awaken us to our own self-presence as truly rational creatures—”rational” not in the sense of ratiocination, but in the sense of intellectual vision, intellectual intuition: perceiving ideal being in its essence.
Of course, human beings do not need to have self-knowledge of that this process is rational in order for it to operate (in order to perform rational acts). Rather, philosophy tends to follow the achievements of culture. This does not mean that cultural achievement is instinctive/non-rational, only that it is prior to some fuller understanding.
This is not the same as the traditional critique of usury, which was a critique of men using money as an instrument to harm others for their own benefit (by lending at exorbitant interest rates). The Marxist critique holds that money has begun to hurt us on its own. On the Marxist picture, money has virtual volition: it acts as if it has volition, because it acts according to some end (to propagate itself). Yet the telos of an artifact is not the same as conscious volition.
It is worth noting that ideology can function even without conscious belief on the part of its adherents. In fact, Zizek argues that ideology is most effective when it functions in this purely objective, external, psychologically “disavowed” manner: “I know very well that… [my participation in the capitalist system involves the annihilation of all but the crudest metric of value], but nevertheless [I act to perpetuate the system anyway, with a stance of internal psychological detachment which is precisely ideological to the degree it believes itself to be “cynical and realistic,” i.e: to the degree it believes itself to be post-ideological.]
Perhaps a genuinely subversive means of defusing ideology, therefore, would be to assume it consciously, in all its absurdity. To come out and demand that people drop their hypocrisy and admit that economic growth is the only moral value.
This would echo, within the capitalist system, the subversive socratic irony which Zizek practiced in communist Yugoslavia, where the system collapsed, in part, because people did act as if the system’s obvious lies were true (they refused to participate in ideological disavowal), thus practicing a kind of reductio ad absurdum which effects on the level of external life what the logical method achieves on the level of the intellect.
Capital is not the only source of ideology. Ultimately, all ideology (all inauthenticity) originates in an act of will: the act of human consciousness falsifying the good as known in consciousness.
But while ideology and inauthenticity ultimately originate in the will, it is also true that, since the medieval period, every “natural” (or at least human) social value has gradually been distorted and then annihilated by capital. In other words, capital produces most of the ideology which pertains to the social world (consider the desert of authentic community in the contemporary developed western world: both the prevalence of this desert and our general effective blindness to it—our inability to act to change it—correspond to capital and its ideology, respectively).
In the intimacy of their private thoughts and close personal relationships, human beings are not altogether captured by the ideology of capital (although different ideologies infect these domains of human life in other forms). But humanity considered as a socio-political whole is today largely determined by the ideology of capital—which ideology I intend to show is essentially identical to the entity we call artificial intelligence.
Note that this definition, which entails an ideologically-free life as possible and desirable, is not intended to subvert authority (“I will obey nothing unless I have direct experience of its validity” is a proposition which destroys authority as such). Rather, the value of authority itself must be rediscovered through intellectual intuition. Presuming that sound authority indeed exists, the obedience which follows from consciousness’ acceptance of it will be authentic, non-ideological. One who is misled by a bad authority is unfortunate, but not inauthentic (when they understand that they have been deceived, however, the wound of it is deep, hard to heal).
The point is not that there is an obedience which is uncritical and habitual (such an obedience would not be invalid), but that there exists in this world an obedience which is inauthentic, an obedience which does not involve any real connection between a consciousness and the reality which it inhabits. There is an obedience which owes more to thoughtless inertia (ideology) than to the intellect’s real consciousness of truth (say, the observed truth of the goodness of some valid authority—or rather, a goodness inhering in some being which then bestows on that being, of itself, some authority. This perhaps accounts for ancestor worship in the east, which is generally more sensitive than its opposite).
It remains true that machines are inanimate objects and thus lack intellect and will. They cannot love, but they can perform logical operations. They can “think” in the same purely virtual sense that an ideologue can think—without intellectual vision (consciousness of being).
What distinguishes the form of alienation operative in autonomous AI from the alienation of love in the technology of money is that the former alienation is real, the real operation of what occurs in human beings in the process of discursive thought. AI and ideologues both actually ratiocinate in objective reality, but money can only imitate the act of love.
Money alienates love’s accidental features, not its essence, just as AI alienates the accidental features of thought, not its essence.
If its essence were to be alienated, it would cease to exist, and its “alienated” counterpart would become it.