To labour and sweat is divine—even when it comes to being divine, it takes sweat and blood. What cannot be learned is done with practice—technique, nothing else.

In a previous age, perhaps it was more clear to think of technology as neutral tool or extension of human faculty—an inert gadget wielded by man for his specific ends. Today, it seems wise to view things rather differently—it’s obvious that technological progress is anything but a neutral trajectory. Technology emerges, nowadays, not merely as a result of scientific progress, but as a self-propelling historical force with its own inherent, far-reaching logics, reshaping industries and minds alike. In many ways, it’s a form of life. One that has increasingly come to govern us.

Today’s central preoccupation for any critical spirit worth its salt, I believe, must be with how to retain human control over this growing technologized complex, while avoiding any regression to anti-scientific utopianism or ill-founded nostalgia for “pre-technological” modes of life. From this vantage point, AI in particular seems an especially tricky matter.

Firstly, there’s the sheer breadth and rapidity of the change we’re undergoing. Nearly every realm of human endeavour is soon to be influenced by AI, from healthcare and warfare to entertainment and politics, everything’s set to feel the effects. Already, for example, “AI” and alogrithms dramatically reshape the largest websites online, tailoring experience in order to sell ads, or ideology, or fear, or some form of exploitation against their users—a transformation of what the shared web means that will only become more obvious as personalization technology becomes increasingly fine-tuned. Within a short space of time, AI will change the way we work. There’s no disputing it.

Secondly, and more than anything else, AI will change the way we think and act. Not just what we think, but the very act of thinking, and most completely the will to do. It’s an important difference.

Much of what passes for thinking today already happens outside of conscious will. With every Google search we make, we offload part of the act of thinking onto complex software programs. For most of us most of the time, what search-engines present us with is good enough. It fits our needs. We might be forgiven, then, for not worrying too much about where the information comes from and how it’s selected from what’s available on the web. After all, who can think about all that—while also performing all the other functions necessary to remain competitive in a highly pressured world?

To do so would be to conceive of search as an act of will, a “phenomenal” or intentional affair involving not just information, but what it means to someone, which is, surely, what the verb “to think” means? To view search in this way, however, is unrealistic in an algorithmic age where “search” increasingly means something like submit to Google’s results. If it’s good enough, why think twice about it? Herein lies what I have called “the paste-ling”—where human output becomes dominated by prefabricated, machine-generated content that we have the illusion of producing ourselves.

It’s not just information we offload to algorithms these days, of course, it’s all kinds of complex reasoning—and willing. Ask a teenager to build an Ikea flat-pack, for example, and they’ll almost certainly refer to a digital assembly manual rather than follow the instructions embedded in the physical parts themselves. Faced with anything they don’t already know how to do, it’s screens rather than signs that will be the default. As we let algorithms handle more and more of what used to be thought of as practical reasoning, the knowledge economy metamorphoses into a kind of algorithmic age that extends far beyond what we might traditionally have thought of as the realm of cognition. AI is about to take over all kinds of complex, creative tasks that most people would have thought immune to automation only a few years ago. Just look at Midjourney or Kling.

Artificial intelligence will change not only how we think, then, but also how we act—and what we become. At the very moment, in fact, that the post-war distinction between a technical-informational sphere on the one hand and the domain of social life and culture on the other hand begins to collapse. I don’t think this can be avoided, but there are reasons to believe that we can control the outcome of the process, and so ensure that it works to the greatest advantage of the human being. Herein lies the necessity of thinking through the phenomenon of AI. It won’t think about itself. We have to do it. And not by turning back the clock.

In what follows, then, I’m going to outline a method of what I shall call “conative discipline”—a form of practical wisdom that enables the human being to regulate his relation with the growing power of algorithmic culture in such a way as to remake, rather than merely retain, his freedom, even as he comes to depend more and more on artificial systems. In other words, I want to propose a way of retaining what’s good about the techno-scientific revolution while transcending its dangers and pitfalls—forging a hybrid will neither wholly human nor wholly machinic. There is no guarantee that this is possible. But there seems no reason to accept defeat in advance. To my mind, it seems only reasonable to assume that so long as humanity retains its unique capacity for free will, there is a possibility for us to devise techniques for cultivating that will in a technologically changing world—and blending it with AI’s own.

It may be useful, at the outset, to define the basic terms I shall be employing here. By “conation” I mean the human capacity for willful action: our ability to take initiative, make choices, act in pursuit of our own goals and objectives. As we’ll see, this capacity has always been a target of what could be called the negative dialectic of history—processes that erode it, from inertia to the psycho-technical organization of work. Now, AI adds new pressures, making it urgent to rethink how conation might evolve.

For this reason, I want to suggest that the phenomenon of AI has to be thought of as a kind of pharmacon. By pharmacon, I mean a thing that can be either a cure or a poison—like opium. It has the potential to be either a prosthesis of will or an anaesthetic. On the one hand, AI might enable the human being to extend their conative capacities into new realms of being, remaking them in concert with machinic logic; on the other, it could reduce him to a passive, receptive being whose conation has atrophied through lack of use. At present, we seem to be caught between these two extremes, which is why it’s so difficult to evaluate where AI is really leading us. And, in some sense, both possibilities are likely to be realized. But if we’re to thrive as conating beings, we need to steer towards the first: we have to develop what I’ll call a conative discipline that will meld our will with AI’s potential as technology progresses.

What follows is an attempt to sketch out what conative discipline might involve in the age of AI. I will not here try to go into detail, nor to offer multiple examples (such a discussion would require more space than I have available here). All I aim to do is to outline some general principles—and one instance.

First of all, then, conation is not the same thing as creativity. There is a tendency, nowadays, to think of the two as one. This is a consequence of the way technology has changed human activity in general. But creativity and conation are very distinct matters, and we do well to keep them apart. Creativity is the capacity for generating new ideas, for coming up with what’s never been thought before. But it doesn’t necessarily imply action. Not every creative thought is put into practice, as every psychologist knows. And it’s certainly not the case that creativity is in itself conation’s driving force—the history of the world shows us that creativity can all-too-easily serve the ends of destructive conation. Moreover, creativity is by no means the only thing that motivates conative action. Even routine tasks can arouse vigorous conation in certain circumstances—such as when there’s a great deal riding on a small chance of success, as in the last scene of Fritz Lang’s M. Conation has to do with action, not thought. While it may be sparked by ideas, it isn’t the same thing as creativity.

Secondly, conation reaches beyond novelty—it’s the grit to overcome resistance, to bend reality to one’s will. This demands repetition, treading the same path, however subtly altered each time. It’s work and struggle, what Friedrich Nietzsche called amor fati, a love of fate that finds purpose in the grind as much as in life’s raw chaos. Conation isn’t limited to instincts, desires, emotions, or ideas—it draws on them all, yet bows to none. That’s why it’s best grasped as technique, rules honed from experience, dictating what to do when, to conquer obstacles and stay true to one’s aims. Techniques lack the sheen of ideas: they’re humbler, harder-won, and far more vital. Only through practice, across experience and experimentation, do they sharpen into tools of real effect.

Now the challenge presented by AI is that it threatens to strip technique bare—or swallow it whole. What we once mastered through effort is increasingly automatized. Technological society would cast us as paste-lings, offloading conation to machine-made outputs we claim as ours—or ceding action entirely to algorithms. This is already rife in work, where automation and data now reign. The bureaucratic rationalization of labour, pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late nineteenth century, has morphed into an algorithmic rationalization of work and will. With AI’s rise, human roles shrink to mere executors of expert systems—or vanish. The result is a proletarianization not just of labour, a trend centuries old, but of conation itself. We’re reduced to labourers for others’ tasks, ideators for others’ thoughts, or bystanders to machine deeds.

It should be clear, then, why AI imperils the human being’s phenomenal freedom, yet also promises to recast it. It threatens to undo centuries of conative development—by reducing us all, bit by bit, to the status of “generators”. Unless we can develop strategies for resisting this fate—and harnessing AI’s potential—it looks as though phenomenal freedom is doomed or at the very least destined for rebirth. What we face, in other words, is the return of the negative dialectic, the return of those processes that tend to erode human conation. We need a conative discipline that enables us to meld our freedom with machine intelligence as it grows. But what might this entail?

It would require fresh techniques of thinking, feeling, and acting, tailored to conating beings in an algorithmic age—methods that braid AI into our will, not yield to it. Scarcely imaginable is a future where we act freely in accordance with our true wills as the world of work—and the world more generally—becomes increasingly data-driven. If we don’t find new ways of doing so, then it seems inevitable that most of us will be reduced to mere executors, no matter how creative or highly skilled we might be. AI won’t spare conative space unless we claim it ourselves. Take, for instance, a graphic designer faced with an AI tool that generates layouts instantly. Rather than accepting its first output, they might use it as a starting point, tweaking it deliberately against its suggestions—say, rejecting symmetry for a jagged, human-edged chaos—to assert their will alongside the machine’s, producing something neither could alone.

It would imply the need to rethink the relationship between work and pleasure. In recent years, there’s been a growing tendency to blur the boundaries between the two as a result of various socio-economic developments. In the field of work, for example, it’s become increasingly common to talk of finding fulfillment and happiness in one’s job—in other words, of merging work and play. Such talk is deeply misleading. Even if it’s true that work and play are merging in certain ways, they remain fundamentally distinct. To ignore this is to render oneself vulnerable to the control of those who do not share one’s conative projects. In an age when most of what goes on in the world of work is likely to be taken over by robots and algorithms, it’s essential that we hold onto the distinction between work and play as a source of strength—and as a space where AI might amplify, not replace, our will.

It would demand that we face AI as the pharmacon it is—neither poison nor cure, but a volatile force hinging on our resolve. Conative discipline is no mere shield against the algorithmic tide, but a way to ride it, to bend it to our ends. The creative partnership is but one glimpse of a will entwined with the machine’s, not subdued by it. Which brings us to our precipice—where AI might numb us into paste-lings, or lift us into a hybrid conation with far greater agency than ever before. To seize the latter is to reject passivity for struggle, to wield technique not as a relic but as a living bridge between human intent and machinic might. There’s no certainty we’ll succeed. But to surrender without a fight is to forfeit what makes us human: the capacity to act, to will, to become.