Preface

The modern Western world is founded on an uncritical acceptance of Western ontology in the very effort to find something common or stable across common histories. It might be misleading, in that it presumes the traditional ontology of permanence, which is tacitly accepted by the sciences, including the sciences we call “human.” Understanding artificial intelligence means coming to understand the issues of productivity, freedom, and temporality. These are basic phenomena that cannot be designed to offer the traditional ontological conceptions of permanence or essence. They are the taken-for-granted and the covered-over dimensions with respect to the interpretations of humans as permanent. We have been immersed in our social institutions, our environment, and our mythologies, and once in a while, they incur revolutions in which we participate, through which we express our choice for a new form of political life, productive relationships, and our social institutions. We will ride the crest of freedom. Yet, after the revolutions, the leaders become either tyrants or professional revolutionaries who invoke the revolutionary laws, the ecstatic wave subsides, and we sink into daily necessities.

All too often, the dream of AI is for a totally rational society which is basically an old Platonic ideal transformed into a future utopia where AI mimics the human, but also expands his powers beyond all reach. AI, as we shall see throughout this manuscript, is, in fact, hinged on productivity, which is a common central theme of politics, labor, and freedom. The human as the maker, the maker society, if you will, is fundamentally, at heart, a magical interpretation of the human. AI is prosthetic magic. Magical “interpretations” does not mean magic in the sense of witchcraft or some mystical framework. We mean it as a mode of self-understanding and self-interpretation of our world and the world in which we are predominantly immersed, which we call technological.

Thanks to Jill Adair McCaughan, Ph.D., who, as editor, requires having the sense that the author is trying to convey. She does it repeatedly.