Saturation, Meaning and Death

Abstract

The demand of a moratorium on the development of AI by influential representatives of tech giants is an ambivalent sign of fear. Baudrillard’s insights on the possible end of capitalism and its regime of simulation, offers opportunities to interpret this sign as the sudden awareness, among techno-corporate elites, that AI may bring about the end of capitalism through conditions of saturation, implosion, excess. These conditions, relates to the relationship between the fear of death and the role of textual competences or ‘meaning-making’ in tackling this fear. The production of ‘meaningless meaning’ through AI textual affordances challenges the status of the text and meaning-making as humans’ atavistic response to the fear of death. As the resiliency of capitalism depends on the suppression of (the fear of) death, the development of AI textual affordances meddles with this response and with the fear it suppresses, suggesting the possibility of technological ‘indeterminism’. Through the mediation of ‘organic’ intelligence and critical knowledge, the fears about AI and the concerns about the end of capitalism by saturation can be construed as preconditions for the epistemic revaluation of the human experience of life and the fear of death against the dehumanizing effects of technological simulation of life. This paper is a preliminary, non-empirical and largely speculative or reflective engagement with three propositions about the relationship between AI textual affordances and the experience of saturation, meaning and death.