Presentation from Jörn Lamla on "Artificial Intelligence as a Hybrid Life Form. On the Critique of Cybernetic Expansion" at the 16th ESA Conference 2024 in Porto, Portugal

Abstract:
Artificial intelligence (AI) challenges human intelligence and our humanistic self-conception. This contribution argues that this is happening for good reasons but is based on a mistaken opposition that falls short. Human beings and technology have always been intertwined in hybrid forms of life. Yet the exact nature of this hybridity is misunderstood when inadequate dichotomies of human subject and technical object are replaced by a totalizing conception of a cybernetic informational universe that reduces all that exists to this latter, single point of comparison. Representing the paradigm of digital society, AI is a bearer and expression of such a cybernetic expansion that both anchors digital analogism in society as a closed system of interpreting the world, or a cosmology, and renders it plausible at the level of knowledge. AI thus deepens and generalizes conventions and functional patterns of justification that have a long history in industrial society. The thesis proposed here is that, to counter this expansive dynamic effectively and critically, more needs to be done than evoke humanistic values. What we need is a better understanding of the ontological heterogeneity of the societal modes of existence that are assembled in hybrid forms of life. Thus, to regain the necessary critical ground for this theoretical debate, the paper uses anthropological theory to explain that a new, digital analogism is spreading with this development, the problematic one-sidedness of which can be better grasped against the background of Philippe Descola's alternative ontological schemes and cosmologies.

The presentation will take place on the 30.08. between 14.30 and 16.00 (WEST) within the session „Non-Human Elements, Hybrid Life Forms, and Social Explanation“, organised by the Research Network 29 (RN29): Social Theory.