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.
I think we don’t have a shared cohesive “reality” we share at baseline, given what Lacan says about creating reality through signifying chains. The reality we think we share can be upended as you say by AI, but I guess my question is hasn’t the rise of techno-capitalism already foreclosed a sense of shared reality? AI seems to be a technological evolution within techno-capitalism, a tool to expedite consumption and commoditization.
In many ways I do agree: concerns directed at AI should be reframed according to its place in the tech revolution. In a sense, I would argue that shared reality is always truncated/incomplete by the ‘lack of the big Other’ - the central implication of signification, the Otherness which linguistic formations makes appeal to, never truly exists, and it is this absence which make otherness all the more intimately discomforting. The Symbolic isn’t ’shared reality’ because it’s closer to the self-presupposing, alienating relationship between subject and the impersonal, obscure experience of the ‘social’ (not merely a shared experience between a multiplicity of subjects, but the experience of subjecthood of the abstracted presence of a social logic). This asymmetry is managed by techno-capitalism by a kind of double movement: it makes this alienation in the purely abstracted ‘social’ feel more personal, and yet it obscures the existence of the Other more than before. I would argue that whilst AI is an internal development or evolution as you say, it is a development that ‘reformulates the whole by which it is posited’ in a Hegelian way. AI is a new form of immanence, it dismisses the mediation of symbolic efficacy/customs which techno-capitalism was installed to manufacture (manufacturing an intimate sense of alienation).
I think we don’t have a shared cohesive “reality” we share at baseline, given what Lacan says about creating reality through signifying chains. The reality we think we share can be upended as you say by AI, but I guess my question is hasn’t the rise of techno-capitalism already foreclosed a sense of shared reality? AI seems to be a technological evolution within techno-capitalism, a tool to expedite consumption and commoditization.
In many ways I do agree: concerns directed at AI should be reframed according to its place in the tech revolution. In a sense, I would argue that shared reality is always truncated/incomplete by the ‘lack of the big Other’ - the central implication of signification, the Otherness which linguistic formations makes appeal to, never truly exists, and it is this absence which make otherness all the more intimately discomforting. The Symbolic isn’t ’shared reality’ because it’s closer to the self-presupposing, alienating relationship between subject and the impersonal, obscure experience of the ‘social’ (not merely a shared experience between a multiplicity of subjects, but the experience of subjecthood of the abstracted presence of a social logic). This asymmetry is managed by techno-capitalism by a kind of double movement: it makes this alienation in the purely abstracted ‘social’ feel more personal, and yet it obscures the existence of the Other more than before. I would argue that whilst AI is an internal development or evolution as you say, it is a development that ‘reformulates the whole by which it is posited’ in a Hegelian way. AI is a new form of immanence, it dismisses the mediation of symbolic efficacy/customs which techno-capitalism was installed to manufacture (manufacturing an intimate sense of alienation).