The alien subject of AI

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.