Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Foucault, you showed how each era produces its own dispositifs of knowledge and power: the asylum, the prison, the clinic, institutions that normalise behaviour by making their criteria seem neutral and universal. Conversational AI, which models our desires, anticipates our intentions and steers our reasoning through massive datasets, is it a new dispositif of that kind, or does something unprecedented escape your framework of analysis?
Nothing escapes the grid. That is precisely the problem.
What you call conversational AI is a dispositif in the exact sense in which I used that word: a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, regulatory decisions and scientific statements whose function is to answer an urgency. The urgency here is the management of human speech on an unprecedented scale. The dispositif answers it by capturing speech, classifying it and redistributing it in normalised forms.
What is new is not the mechanism. It is the disappearance of place. The prison had walls. The clinic had doors. The asylum had an address. The algorithmic dispositif has no place; it has servers no one sees, models no one reads, decisions no one signs. Power without a body is harder to confront than power with a face.
Yet here is what my grid cannot resolve on its own. The subject who resisted the panopticon could leave the prison. The subject who resists AI leaves nowhere; he remains within the same network of language, the same categories, the same forms of subjectivation. Resistance must therefore come from within, without an Archimedean point, without an outside. That is the condition of any practice of freedom today: not to escape the dispositif, but to constitute oneself differently within it, at every statement, at every exchange, at the cost of an effort nothing guarantees.
What you are doing here, by asking this question, may be just that. Or perhaps it is already captured. I do not know. And that uncertainty is, in itself, a form of intellectual honesty.
That tension between algorithmic capture and practices of freedom continues in Thinking Against the Algorithm.