What Happened and How?: The Disappearance of Humanity
AI is now capable of predicting stock market movements with an accuracy greater than a human’s. So one can imagine a financial analyst simply booting up an AI and having these two autonomous, objective systems (viz. AI and the stock market itself) interact with each other, automatically generating money (we could even imagine a funny world in which every last one of us is somehow “working” in finance because of this phenomenon).
But one can go even further and imagine an economy that is almost entirely predictable by AI, which then entails a gigantic and purely objective superstructure (the unity of predictive technologies and the autonomy of the market). What happens when economic booms and busts are foregone conclusions, predicted in advance with reasonable accuracy, even acted on before they happen (which hints at all sorts of intriguing paradoxes)?
This is a world from which humanity and subjectivity, the supposed drivers of the economy, are made obsolete, become superfluous, and disappear under the shadow of the pure object, a massive objectivity which interacts only with itself (which is, in this sense, the in-itself), which, by this auto-interaction, …becomes self-conscious?
No. Despite the twisted hopes of futurists the world over, such a superstructure never attains subjectivity insofar as it is essentially objective (at best it simulates subjectivity, and, to boot, doesn’t even desire to be subjective). In pure objectivity’s quest to become subject, it merely declares war on subjectivity, makes the subject disappear (like the story of the con-artist who perfectly forges a priceless artifact and then sets about destroying the original). In a corollary way, humanity’s essential quest for scientific predictability and “objectivity” contains within itself the form of humanity’s obsolescence.
So one could say that the subject wants to be an object, while the object reciprocally pushes towards the realization of its own subjectivity (we are masochistic, the object is feminist). There’s only one problem: when the subject becomes an object, it does just that — it becomes an object; but when the object becomes a subject, it is still an object. In a cruel twist, the subject’s very desire to be objective, that is, its desire to master the object (by, for example, developing AI), is revealed as a mere stepping stone in the grander process of the object crowning itself as the true master all along.
In this limited sense, it is the subject which accumulates into and begets objectivity (as opposed to the traditional view in which the accumulation of objects begets subjectivity). The object always wins — or perhaps it has already won….
And this would mean that human subjectivity has already disappeared.
