AI as the Political Unconscious of Terminal Capitalism: Toward a Critical Pedagogy for Conscious Life

• In Event: Critical Pedagogy in the Age of AI: Education, Power, and Politics of New Technologies

Abstract

It is increasingly difficult to discern science from fiction; utopian dreams from dystopian nightmares. Are we living in a computer simulation? Can we achieve immortality? Will malevolent AI enslave or destroy humanity? Many Silicon Valley CEOs and AI developers appear convinced that AI is accelerating on a path to artificial general intelligence (AGI) where machines develop God-like agency to recursively improve and self-modify. Timelines vary wildly, from 5 to 100 years. But almost all agree that if this mythical singularity were to occur it would unleash unpredictable and uncontrollable powers that could lead to human extinction.

There are, of course, skeptics who do not believe AGI is possible and optimists who only view the upside of creating God-in-a-box. My interest in this paper is to read dystopian fears of AI symptomatically, as the political unconscious of an actually-existing terminal regime. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, I argue that the cultural logics of AI, particularly narratives of machine apocalypse, reflect repressed anxieties as technological escalation combines with the real subsumption of planetary life within the algorithmic logic of capital. I note how AI is not simply an outcome or effect of discrete technical or scientific knowledge, rather it is inextricably linked to capitalism, dominated by a handful of powerful corporate entities aiming at commercial applications, discarding human labor, and intertwined with war, military, and imperial ambitions.

Second, the paper looks at the intersection of capitalism and technology as indicative of a terminal regime that encloses non-computational forms of thinking, living, relating, and existing. The aim is to highlight a number of intersecting planetary processes and techno-linguistic automatisms that are generating fractures of conscious life within computational capitalism and are driving widespread disorientation and paralysis. This speaks to a paradox of possibility where truly wild utopian and dystopian fantasies—The Becoming Skynet of the AI Brain—circulate while underlying world-destroying processes are rendered unintelligible where it becomes unthinkable to imagine altering systems of production, labor, exchange, consumption, and growth. This represents a truly warped view of intelligence and the vanishing of livable futures.

Third, the paper, outlines how alternative perspectives on the reconfiguration or repurposing of technology for progressive projects or emancipatory politics ignore the crucial question of education and the inextricable link between pedagogy and politics. I outline the parameters of a radical pedagogy applicable to the political unconscious of AI that might build alternative forms of intelligence, artistic, and technical capabilities to navigate the fracture of conscious life. This would include hybrid cultures; historicity and memory; the autonomy of intellects within the techno-linguistic automatisms, and visions of decolonization rooted radical humanism and anti-essentialism that reject posthuman misanthropy and the essentialism of new the fascisms.

Author

• Alexander Means, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa