machine-writing

Drawing on the media theory of Bernard Stiegler, this riPOSTe to recent ebr essays by Heckman, Cayley and Pold considers the implications of automation for knowledge - both its loss among humans, and its acquistion by AI.

Accepting Søren Bro Pold's proclamation that "the social knowledge base of the University has already disappeared", Davin Heckman locates a few, forward looking prospects for a reconstruction of the Humanities in Jean-François Lyotard's "famously sloppy" Postmodern Condition (1971), Hannah Arendt's Human Condition(1958), and Imanuel Kant's prescient hope that the University could serve as a "mediating nexus among a growing array of conflicting professional tendencies."

In this anticipation of John Cayley's ebr essay on Artificial Intelligence, Scott Rettberg contextualizes some of the ethical and systemic problems of ChatGPT and argues that works of electronic literature and digital art might serve as tutor texts for understanding effects of technological mediation on humanity.

Pold extends Heckman's "thrilling (if not chilling)" critique to left-wing understandings and critical takes by theorists such as Walter Ong, Bernard Stiegler, and Vannevar Bush.

Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' Although Cayley incorporates new material and newly contextualized examples, referring chiefly to his own work, what follows is also the reconfigured rewrite of a recent essay for a series of conferences and a peer-reviewed online journal, Political Concepts, which can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDJRQYRWpvQ.