Conviviality, the Internet, and AI. Ivan Illich, Bernard Stiegler, and the Question Concerning Information-technological Self-limitation

Abstract In his book Tools for Conviviality (1975), Ivan Illich calls for human self-limitation in technology development. His aim is neither environmental protection nor the prevention of unforeseen side-effects of technology development, but the comprehensibility of technologies’ operating principles for the user. For if the construction or repairing of tools requires expert knowledge inaccessible to the public, this necessarily entails social imbalances in power. In a similar manner, Bernard Stiegler conceives the delegation of know-how to technological systems as a kind of proletarianization that ultimately may result in a loss of savoir-vivre. Without sweepingly rejecting the division of labour, automation or specialized knowledge, practices of commoning respond to such diagnoses: free software like GNU/Linux or open hardware largely succeed in unlinking the expert knowledge that advanced computing doubtlessly requires from problematic power effects. From this perspective, proprietary algorithms are problematic, as their lack of transparency prevents conviviality. This also holds for the practices of data aggregation and extraction which steadily increase the information gap between platform providers and users. An even more fundamental problem is posed by so-called “self-learning”, i.e., recursively adapting, algorithms: it is not clear how and to what extent the knowledge and instructions generated by “artificial intelligence” can be traced and reconstructed by human insight. Thus, we are confronted with a situation of potentially non-recoverable proletarianization and non-conviviality that exposes a renewed urgency of Illich’s considerations concerning technological self-limitation.