Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Vachnadze, G. (2024) Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming Press. 978-9925-8118-8-5. Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence, written by Wittgenstein and Foucault scholar Giorgio Vachnadze, draws a circle around many topics that have been important to Becoming’s editorial line, from epistemology to cybernetics, biopolitics, philosophy of music and semiology. The …

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Giorgi Vachnadze, The Bio-Politics of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies and Eschatological Narratives, Epoché, Issue #73 July 2024 Extract In agreement with Hubert Dreyfus (1972), we could easily say: “The story of artificial intelligence might well begin around 450 B.C.” That won’t give us much beyond words however. That’s not the commitment we can make for …

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Gordon Hull, LLM, Inc. New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science blog, 27 February 2024 In previous posts (one, two, three), I’ve been exploring the issue of what I’m calling the implicit normativity in language models, especially those that have been trained with RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback). In the most recent one, I argued …

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Karastergiou, A. AI and Madness (2023) In David Goodman, Matthew Clemente (eds) The Routledge International Handbook of Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Technology, Routledge, 2023, pp. 281-292. DOI: 10.4324/9781003195849-28 Abstract Are the concepts of “madness” and “normality” applicable to modern AI technologies? In this chapter, we will endeavor on a journey to explore how Foucault’s conception of …

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Rob Horning, From work to text, and back again: ChatGPT and the (new) death of the author, Overland, 23 February 2023 When he declared the death of the author, in 1968, Roland Barthes was attacking the idea that our understanding of any particular text should be conditioned or constrained by the person who happened to …

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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 …

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Nyman, S. The Birth of AI-driven Nudges (2023) Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2023-January, pp. 5252- 5261. https://hdl.handle.net/10125/103276 Abstract AI methods allow for a multitude of new forms of managerial control. One is algorithmic nudging, in which organizations use AI methods to control workers through targeted recommendations. Drawing upon Michel …

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Saffron Huang, Chat GPT and the death of the author, The New Statesman, 26 February 2023 In 1967, in an essay called “The Death of the Author”, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes argued that people should stop viewing the author’s intentions and biography as the ultimate source of meaning in a text. A text’s …

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Some Reasons to be Skeptical of AI Authorship, Part 1: What is an (AI) Author? By Gordon Hull, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 06 February 2023 Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT burst into public consciousness sometime in the second half of last year, and Chat-GPT’s impressive results have led to a wave of …

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