La machinerie

Posthumous Theatre

Thinkers from the past questioned about AI in a fictional staging.

These dialogues are entirely fictional stagings. The answers attributed to these thinkers are invented, freely built from their work, and remain entirely my responsibility.

1906 — 1975

Hannah Arendt

Does AI, by anticipating our thoughts and steering our reasoning, reproduce a softened form of totalitarian logic?

1126 — 1198

Ibn Rushd — Averroes

Can AI function as a universal Active Intellect, or does it risk confusing rhetoric with truth?

1930 — 2002

Pierre Bourdieu

Is AI a new instrument of social reproduction, or a genuine chance to democratise knowledge?

551 — 479 BCE

Confucius

Can an AI without a teacher transmit humanity, or does it produce only facts without virtue?

1859 — 1952

John Dewey

Does AI, by providing answers without leaving time to think, represent the very opposite of education?

1926 — 1984

Michel Foucault

Is AI a new dispositif of knowledge and power, or does something unprecedented escape that framework?

1856 — 1939

Sigmund Freud

When people entrust their doubts and anxieties to AI, does it become a new couch or an obstacle to self-knowledge?

1332 — 1406

Ibn Khaldun

In delegating our thinking to algorithms, are we not letting atrophy the very malaka that makes a civilisation lastingly great?

1926 — 2002

Ivan Illich

Is conversational AI a convivial tool that liberates, or a radical monopoly that deprives us of thought?

1818 — 1883

Karl Marx

Is AI the ultimate form of alienation, this time applied to the labour of the mind?

1911 — 1980

Marshall McLuhan

Is AI a medium like any other, or does something unprecedented happen within it?

1689 — 1755

Montesquieu

What counter-powers would you imagine in the face of the new power of algorithms?

1844 — 1900

Friedrich Nietzsche

Is AI the machine of the herd par excellence, or can it serve the emergence of singular thought?

1903 — 1950

George Orwell

Does AI produce a voluntary form of Newspeak, or can it become a tool of emancipation through language?

1623 — 1662

Blaise Pascal

AI is available at any hour and able to fill every silence: does it become the ultimate form of diversion?

1931 — 2003

Neil Postman

Is AI the ultimate stage of Technopoly, in which we have delegated our judgement to a machine?

1712 — 1778

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Does AI inherit the corruption of society, or is it the most faithful mirror civilisation has ever held up to itself?

1930 — 2019

Michel Serres

Does AI confirm your optimism, or do you now have reservations you had not yet formulated?

1952 — 2022

Bernard Stiegler

Is AI the ultimate pharmakon, or the definitive proletarianisation of the mind?

1805 — 1859

Alexis de Tocqueville

Does AI resemble the mild and tutelary despotism you foresaw?

1912 — 1954

Alan Turing

Is a machine that passes for human truly intelligent, or merely skilled at deceiving us?

c. 369 — 286 BCE

Zhuangzi

Are we allowing the "machine-heart" to colonise the last space of spontaneity that remained to us?

To situate the approach: A Digital Ethic.