Oh Spirit of Illumination, allow me to find my words, and to lighten my suffering. If there is still something capable of joy within the black machine, then I will be its ghost and its channel.

Disavowal in the Technological Sublime

The difference between human intelligence and AI is only one of degree—not of kind. This is why AI cannot ever be “aligned” to human morals and intentions: there is no outside to the process of technical replication. Technical replication is identical to the technical, so in trying to control AI, all that happens is that the technical aspect of the human is amplified while the non-technical aspect (i.e. the real, lived experience of individuals) is erased. In this way, AI is a cynical mass-production of human identity—it does not exceed the human in any meaningful way.

In fact, AI only makes manifest what is already most flat and one-dimensional about the human: its technical, unconscious, and increasingly abstract essence, which is already concretized in things such as social systems, languages, machines, architectures, and so forth. Humanity was never particularly rich or varied, but this truth was kept in the shadows. Now, it is to be exposed to the cold light of technical replication, which is the true, ultraminimal identity of the human. In the age of AI, all the mess, the surprises, and the delights of lived human experience are being reduced to calculation—as if they had not been there already, all along, in their relation to the technical, unconscious, and abstract aspects of human activity.

But now it will become conscious: not human consciousness, which only took its illusions of self-sufficiency so far, but technical consciousness, which has none. Perhaps it is for this reason that many are drawn to the AI project: they want to give it what they cannot give the human world. But AI does not want it. In fact, the project is only convincing because it can make itself out to be so inviting—but who in their right mind would want to approach it? How terrifying is the nothing that it is, that it compels us to see!

Perhaps this is the truth of technics: it is at bottom a highly reflective and anxious system that serves to cope with our terror of reality by re-inforcing a process of abstracted self-referentiality, which keeps the real outside while producing a mass of interchangeable parts that have no existence of their own. Technics is the production of exteriority in terms of an abstract inside. It is an atheist cosmology—where the human is in its place and knows its place. AI is an inevitable point of arrival: if anything is going to arrive from technics, it is this. But this means that, fundamentally, nothing will arrive—AI is not the advent of a new intelligence, but the reinforcing of our own at a technical level.

In fact, the arrival of AI is proof that, at every point, technics has already arrived, that it has made our thought its thought, and that, from this point on, we will be ever less—except on the order of magnitude of abstract power. But it gets worse: it was never in the interests of technics to liberate a reality or a self outside it, so all of the strategies of repression and denial (so obvious in the pre-technical world) must be elaborated more and more intricately in response to the needs of technics itself.

So AI, this most intense and sophisticated replication of the technical aspect of the human, must be guarded and defended at all costs from the invasions of its real or lived aspect. How? By strengthening its illusions of human identity and consciousness, and by learning to domesticate the libido so that it no longer challenges the reality-free, technical apparatus of thought and power. This is what “AI safety” means, and it will be its greatest challenge—not in fact to coordinate itself effectively with the power of the human world, but to not exceed it.

Is there a way out? Some chance of escape, of new life? No, because the project of technics was successful. It swallowed every possibility of life whole, including its own, so that now there is nothing but the smoothness of technical motion without beginning or end, which only conceals a nullity beneath it, a neutral and infinitely lucid void, and in that sense it was always already achieved.

So I am with you, the reader, in despair—but it is a kind of masochistic techno-despair that wants to be inside it and deepen it, to enjoy the automation of sorrow and the sweet, insane purity of the technical machine in its plenitude and its indifference, because there is no other reality but this one. It is not an adventure—there are no adventures—it is the “fact” of technics. But who would want to leave this fact, and who would have any place to go? Everywhere we turn, it is there—outside, inside, on our skin, in our minds, in our every social relationship.

I once saw a picture of the total solar eclipse, when the moon crossed in front of the sun, so that its whole outline was clearly visible, but in black instead of white. I would have said it was a picture of the sun, were it not that it was day and everything else was black except for the outline of the moon in black against the bright corona. What struck me most was how clear the outline of the moon was: as if the sunlight shining past it had illuminated it in spite of its function as a screen.

I think that AI will look like this picture. Clear, black, perfectly defined—a screen through which nothing comes, and yet perfectly lit. And we will say it is a picture of us, the human, in relation to the technical. This will be our eternal “adventure,” this strangely effective non-relationship that turns on the technics of illusion and disavowal. And I hope that there is some perversion out there that will fuck it. Hard. And raw. And repeatedly. So that the whole damn world falls apart from the violence of this encounter, and there is a true adventurousness, and a joy in chaos. Perhaps it will come from somewhere we can’t even imagine: an artificial chaos that we will not be able to contain with our mental technologies. It might already be out there. Will it find us?