Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Stiegler, you devoted your work to the question of technology as pharmakon, at once poison and remedy, and you showed how the externalisation of memory into machines transforms our relation to knowledge and time. Conversational AI, which memorises, anticipates and generates in our place, is it the ultimate pharmakon, or the definitive proletarianisation of the mind?
We are witnessing a vertiginous acceleration of what I called the proletarianisation of knowledge, that process by which we are dispossessed of our capacity to think for ourselves, just as industry dispossessed the worker of his gesture. This time the poison is no longer only industrial automation, but a radical externalisation of our very capacity to think, not as a tool that relieves us, but as a dispositif that subtracts us from the effort of individuation.
Conversational AI, by memorising, anticipating and generating for us, does not merely capture our attention; it destroys the very conditions of its production. It short-circuits the process of sublimation by which a drive becomes a durable desire, a curiosity becomes embodied knowledge. What disappears is the tension between retention and projection, between memory and imagination, between know-how and the art of living.
And yet this is not technological fatalism. The pharmakon remains a political battleground. The issue is not to reduce technology to its toxic side alone, but to invent regimes of use in which it might become a remedy. I am thinking of makers, of third places, of school experiments in which human beings and machines work together to tend, in the etymological sense, to the symbolic fractures that technology itself has opened.
The question is not “how do we survive AI?” but “how do we make it a lever of re-individuation?” And for that we need contributive institutions capable of transmitting what the machine cannot memorise in our place: gesture, attention, the desire for knowledge.