CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Intellectual Operator in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Image by Sumaid pal Singh Bakshi.

One of the greatest dogmas of the recent past is rapidly losing its validity: the mechanical “coding craze” that converted every educational institution into a STEM center, alongside the dream of purely technical knowledge stripped of philosophy, is coming to an end. As areas such as coding, mathematical modeling, and data analytics become executable by digital systems within seconds, plain engineering knowledge is swiftly becoming commonplace.

New-generation production technologies inherently learn from statistical aggregations of past data. Therefore, when the guiding intellect remains weak, they produce merely an “algorithmic conservatism” that repeats the clichés of the past. As Byung-Chul Han puts it, they create a smooth but soulless world purged of negativity. If you attempt to make these systems rewrite those existential silences in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the resulting text is grammatically flawless yet artistically dead........

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