Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 321.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2026-02-09 09:49:14+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: taking 'AI' at its word (or acronym)

Thanks to John Naughton for underscoring the enshittification Abbate
highlights in Susskind's "glib survey". But I would go a step further
back to the act which makes it trivially easy for glibbers like Susskind
to darken the public mind: reifying the phenomena uncovered (or 
created) by artificial intelligence research, reducing them to a 
ghostly acronym. Befuddled by a deluge of promotionalism we fail 
to ask the core question: What is 'AI'?

In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments ([1969] 2002),
Max Horkheim and Theodor Adorno put the problem in a nutshell: “all
reification is forgetting” (p. 191). 'AI' is a forgetting of the significance 
of what the products of artificial intelligence research has enabled. 
Mindlessly using 'AI' as if it were a thing, we drop the question before 
it can be asked. We are dumbed down.

Much work to do, no?

Comments?

All best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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