Abstract
Immersed in the networks of artificial intelligences that are constantly learning from each other, the subject today is being configured by the automated architecture of a computational sovereignty (Bratton 2015). All levels of decision-making are harnessed in given sets of probabilities where the individuality of the subject is broken into endlessly divisable digits. These are specifically re-assembled at check points (Deleuze in Negotiations: 1972–1990, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995), in ever growing actions of predictive data (Cheney-Lippold in We are data and the making of our digital selves, NYU Press, New York, 2017), where consciousness is replaced by mindless computations (Daston in “The rule of rules”, lecture Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, November 21st, 2010). As a result of the automation of cognition, the subject has thus become ultimately deprived of the transcendental tool of reason. This article discusses the consequences of this crisis of conscious cognition by the hands of machines by asking whether the servo-mechanic model of technology can be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, but also beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject. As much as the socio-affective qualities of the user have become the primary sources of capital abstraction, value, quantification and governmental control, so has technology, as the means of abstraction, itself changed nature. This article will suggest that the cybernetic network of communication has not only absorbed physical and cognitive labour into its circuits of reproduction, but is, more importantly, learning from human culture, through the data analysis of behaviours, the contextual use of content and the sourcing of knowledge. The theorisation of machine learning as involving a process of thinking will be taken here as a fundamental inspiration to argue that the expansion of an alien space of reasoning, envisioning the possibility of machine thinking against the servo-mechanic model of cybernetics.
Highlights
This article discusses the consequences of this crisis of conscious cognition by the hands of machines by asking whether the servomechanic model of technology can be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, and beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject
In the context of the global idea of race operating through the transcendental tool of reason, to what extent is it possible to try and reverse the argument about the crisis of conscious cognition of the human by the hands of machines and rather ask if there is no subject outside of technology, is it true to say that there is no technology without a subject? If so, what would it mean for technology to have a subject? In other words, can the servo-mechanic model of technology be overturned to expose the alien subject of artificial intelligence as a mode of thinking originating at, and beyond, the transcendental schema of the self-determining subject?
Instead the subject is being reconfigured from the standpoint of a learning machine, which has replaced the primary phases of information accumulation with the generative layers of machine-to-machine communication unfolding a new form of technocultural production based on artificial intelligence
Summary
It has been argued that the digital subject has seen the consistency of its organic unity shattered into bites and bits: infinitely aggregating parts that give us the illusion of decisional integrity by the click. What the collective Tiqqun proposes and Galloway’s analysis endorses is that the dominance of cybernetic automation and its spatialised regime of smoothness gives us the illusion of a united subject imprisoned in interactive communication This image of the network, cannot be embraced as a form of politics but instead it must be counter-actualised, resisted and challenged in order to break the apparent heterogeneity of a monolithic network. Harvey’s video CV Dazzle Look 5 illustrates how automated image analysis works, by comparing one face with and one without make-up and experimenting with what remains invisible and imperceptible to machines These efforts to break from the cybernetic hypothesis of a unified subject in the image of networked data by calling forth for a impersonal and invisible politics more profoundly coincide with a reactive response to the crisis of political possibilities to think, act and live beyond the cybernetic script. There are many versions of this view, I will refer to it as generally proposing a rather nuanced materialist approach and not an idealist rejection of instrumentality
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