Description
Today’s hype about Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a panacea for the world’s ills assumes that the world and its components, including humans, are just ‘like’ computers. Such cybernetic metaphors shape ideas about the world and its workings – whether that is the human brain as a computer, or society as a system of feedback loops. Drawing metaphorically on our latest creative in(ter)ventions to make sense of the world has a long history, with theories of probability and statistics casting a long shadow from early modernity to today. With a frame of reference that in its theoretical essence started as a gambler’s dispute in 1664, and which has become the substrate of our present-day rationality, how is the world, and our idea of agency, shaped when read through the logic of statistical computation? What are the political and ethical consequences of conceiving of humans / world in this way? How are visions for the future shaped, when the cybernetic condition is epitomised in the ethos of Silicon Valley? This paper explores the logical foundations of seeing the world and its constitutive elements like a computer and traces the deeply embedded cybernetic ideas of the world as a distinct political project of modernity.
