The Threat of AI is not the Loss of Reality, but the Actualisation of Reality

A new ‘age of metaphysics’ rises over the horizon with accelerated developments in artificial intelligence that place a shared category of concern central to conservative as much as liberal narratives. Industry sectors rush to adapt and reposition themselves in the light of fundamental reorganisations of consumer relations to information, education, finance, and technology, with each advance coloured by a simultaneous inverse: our adaptation to this new AI-reality is in itself a placing-into-question of what is to be made of reality itself.

The communal outcry raised against the auto-generating AI Tower of Babel rests itself on a concern grounded in everyday life: with deepfakes and information exchange heralding a reorganisation of the very coordinates of ‘fake news’, with AI predictions reconstructing the financial sector, with our experience of the social sphere at the mercy of technological revolutions, reality itself will become obscured. It is indeed this question of AI’s tango with reality which points in the direction of a renewed metaphysical inquiry. Reality, as the concerned narrative runs, will no longer be what is accessible to our sensual experience of the world and intersubjective relations in the social sphere. Reality is reconfigured at its very core, and with this technological revolution the ‘virtual’ will be installed where reality once acted as a collective guide pole.

However it is precisely this metaphysical concern which should be inverted. Reality will not suffer at the rise of the virtual; it is rather the reframing of the virtual which makes reality all too concrete and present to us. In other words, the threat of AI is not the dissolution of reality, but the positioning of reality all too intimately in the foreground of experience.

We depend on the virtual as a component of the everyday. It is the ‘principle of the virtual’ which allows everyday life in all of its aspects to proceed smoothly. Political economy operates not by a direct interaction with modes and structures of economic production, but with symbolic use-and-exchange values which allow commodities and money to be treated as nothing more than discreet, conventional objects, as nothing more than commodities and money. To see commodities for what they really are (in themselves empty supports of a set of de-centralising, globalised economic production-relations) would spoil their efficiency in everyday life. Financial markets are conceptualised and discussed in a way which obscure their internal mechanisms, for the benefit of a communal practical comprehension allowing us to live side-by-side with them. Where their ‘virtual’ conceptions faulter or are misguided, the inarticulable reality of their structures erupt into daily life with all of the crises and financial crashes that we are forced to maneuver at regular intervals.

The virtual is a necessary component of our ‘real experience’ of the world. Conventional symbolic expressions and fictions allow for social life’s smooth transactionality. Social relations are no exception. Language and discourse operate not by depicting the ‘real structure’ of things, but through signifying ‘formulas’ which prioritise efficiency and continued social interaction. Words and syntax operate according to their social value, their filling of intersubjective ‘space’, and not to directly establish a relation to reality and its concept. Language allows for poetry because it rarely ‘means what it intends to’. If the phrase ‘I love you’ was unproblematic and self-explanatory, there would be no need for romantic poetry. In order for language to be effectively oriented away from the virtuality of the social and towards reality as such, logic becomes necessary, and as one of the founders of philosophical logic, Bertrand Russell, stated in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, where higher-order (e.g. mathematical) logic is used, everyday language as it is commonly understood is not necessary. Our social dependence on the virtual is easy enough to see. When we greet an unlikable co-worker or irritating member of our social circle, we treat them politely for the sake of a necessary fiction, and even when the feeling is mutual, the co-worker or friend responds politely and asks how we’re doing. Workplaces and social interactions would hardly be efficient if the reality of everyone’s thoughts and feelings were permanently on display.

The virtual is ineluctable and for good reasons. The concerns regarding aggressive innovations in AI must therefore be inverted slightly. The effects of AI, as can be seen even by the briefest engagement with news on current research, will be felt in the social and economic sphere: news and disinformation, obfuscated borders between online and offline social interactions, the experience of financial markets, macro and micro-economic structures etc. AI is not attacking what there really is (reality, in other words) but something far more fragile and crucial: it is disturbing the customs and mechanisms of the virtual.

With this in mind, our knowledge of the virtual, and its meaning for our experience of reality, is a category which psychoanalysis is exceptionally well-fitted to analyse. A dream reported to and recounted by Freud makes for a privileged example: A father whose infant son had passed away only some hours earlier sat himself down in the living room during the evening. The son was left in a crib in his room with a family friend watching over his corpse, and during this time the father eventually succumbed to his exhaustion and fell asleep. In his sleep, he saw the image his infant son engulfed in fire, who confronted him with the question, ‘Father, do you not see that I am burning?’ Terrified, the father woke up to see that the edge of the child’s crib had caught on fire, unnoticed by the family friend who had himself also fallen asleep. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan reads in this story the paradoxical entanglement between the virtual and the real. The virtual is not simply an exception to reality, but is a determining component of our experience of reality. Reality is structured according to its virtual, symbolic aspect. The ‘real of the virtual’ can function to make reality itself more terrifying than it is, and it is precisely this which happened for the father in the story. Whilst a naïve interpretation may state that the dream acted as an ‘escape’ from reality, this would not explain why the dream is more terrifying than the real situation, by the reproach of the son. The virtual structures experience, and where it is distorted it magnifies and reframes the horrors of reality itself. This ‘real of the virtual’ makes reality all too unbearable, too close to home to be able to efficiently accommodate. This is the inversion that the AI revolution threatens when the ‘metaphysical question’ is on the table.

AI does not obscure reality, it rips off the mask of reality. Its effect lies in its distortion of the virtual, the installation of a new set of coordinates on which social, economic, and political relations are acted out. Yet as in Freud’s dream this attack on the virtual will make the real itself all too uncomfortably present.

With the migration of the social to the virtual AI landscape, it is the mechanisms of sociality which are dissected and laid out for us. We feel more alienated because our neighbour is far too close for comfort, because the underlying reality of social interactions can suddenly be taken for what they always were, losing their healthy lubrication by the mediation of the virtuality of language and custom. The brute functioning of market forces similarly loses its mediation in the ‘friendly’ face of local business and monetary exchange. AI deals with the social and the economic according to its ‘real logic’, unhindered by the mediation of the virtual, and in so doing brings the hard facts (the crises, paradoxes, and discomforts) of the real world to the foreground.

The paradox of AI is not that we must ‘seek for the real’ behind a growing web of the virtual, but that it exposes the real for what it has always been. It throws the real in our faces and forces upon us a confrontation with it, without any symbolic or virtual guidelines.