Giorgi Vachnadze, The Algorithmic Unconscious: Psychoanalyzing Artificial Intelligence, Non, 15 July 2023
I recently came across an article that caught my attention. Written just last year. It draws a parallel between AI and psychoanalysis. Which seemed until now two completely divergent fields. It argues that we can psychoanalyze an AI. But how would that make sense? Machine Behavior, an emerging field in “psycho-robotics”, argues that it does.
“We need to study AI systems not merely as engineering artifacts, but as a class of social actors with particular behavioral patterns and ecology (Possati, L.M. 2020).”
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An artificial creativity seems to be the basis for an artificial unconscious. Which in turn serves to allow us to speak meaningfully about a society of Artificial Intellects, or Artificial Actors, Subjects, Citizens etc. This brings us to the idea of a Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence, a term that does not exist yet, but one that I wish to establish as part of my larger research project concerning Biopolitics. To repeat, this notion does not form any part of Possati’s research, at least not explicitly.
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AI Biopolitics would be a study of the conditions of possibility as well as the social impact of AI on existing power-relations in a given society. How various AI systems would be used to promote class interests, privileged groups, powerful organizations, economic exploitation, warfare, minority exclusion, political agendas etc. The integration of Machine Learning into bureaucratic institutions, government surveillance systems and the police apparatus. Their role in criminality, questions of privacy and their overall function in supporting technocratic capitalism. If AI’s would be given the legal powers of an autonomous citizen, whilst following a set of hidden commands of ideologically biased algorithms, we would be dealing with yet another assault at human freedom and dignity.
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