A matter of meaning, life and death. Text, AI and the human condition

Abstract

The main reason for concerns about the social impact of AI textual functions relate not primarily to the labour market or education, but to the political economy of meaning. The starting point of this critique is the analysis of ‘artificial intelligence’ as a metaphor that hide and mystifies fundamental differences between human and AI textual functions. This metaphor reduces intelligence to its computational and instrumental aspects and establishes instrumental rationality as a normative model for human intelligence. Contra these implications, I argue the case for the revaluation of meaning-making and textual functions of intelligence as an adaptive response to the problem of death which is uniquely human. These functions are politically relevant because human texts are the tools for the transformation of the subjective experience of life and death into the intersubjective sense of reality. To delegate these functions to advanced forms of computational technology is tempting but risky because the expurgation of subjectivity and, more broadly, the suppression of the dilemmas constituting the human conditions, weakens fundamental evolutionary competences, enhance the oppressive potential of instrumental reason and leads to the unfreedom of the post-political condition.