the spiral of chaos and automaton
Consciousness, intelligence and AI: interview with BARBARA WEIGEL (2019)
Con una certa emozione ho appena ricevuto una copia dell’edizione cinese di The Soul at Work.
Nanjing University Press, 2025
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Consciousness, intelligence and AI
(2019)
in the year 2019 I gave this interview to Barbara Weigel (aka Ila Castelli) .
The interview is followed by texts by Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweill Symphony Screenversion, by Barbara Weigel
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prima edizione di The Soul at work, edizione Semiotexte, 2008
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La espiral de caos y automatización
Un mapa del siglo que amenaza
El texto completo se puede leer en la revista CTXT:
https://ctxt.es/es/20250601/Firmas/49475/franco-bifo-berardi-espiral-caos-automatizacion-mutacion-cognitiva-chatbot.htm
La brutalidad ha estallado por doquier, convirtiéndose en la norma general de la vida social
Abandonar la historia para salir del doloroso caos.
La humanidad esta desapareciendo. El mundo humano continuará gracias al autómata cognitivo que hemos construido y que estamos construyendo
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CHAOS AND THE AUTOMATON, e-flux
Minnesota Press
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The spiral
of chaos and automation
A map of the impending century
No political thinker or social scientist foresaw what is happening in the third decade of the Century 21st. Only dystopian writers like Philip Dick, Norman Spinrad, George Ballard, Liu Cixin Sakaya Murata and Octavia Butler had glimpses of our present.
Let’s have a look at the global landscape: reason is replaced by force, social justice is despised as an aberrant intrusion into the freedom of individuals, the ferocity of competition takes the place of law: those who are not up to ferocity only deserve to be slaves or to die.
As Thomas Wade says in Liu Cixin's novel (Dark Forest): “If we lose our humanity we lose something, if we lose our bestiality we lose everything.
After the genocide that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinian people, brutality has exploded everywhere as the general rule of social life.
The massive deportation of migrants, the systematic rejection of refugees, the generalized genocide at the border between the North and the South of the world: everywhere brutality is spreading with a ferocity that no social or political scientist had ever foreseen.
Just some dystopian writers have imagined scenarios that resemble the unleashing of ferocity that is currently before our eyes.
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White terror in the US
https://theintercept.com/2025/07/07/ice-raids-la-violence-video-bystanders/
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In 1993 Octavia Butler wrote The parable of the sower: the story unfolds in 2025. Today.
In the United States of America a guy called Donner has just won elections, and promised to return America to its former greatness. Make America great again. The America of which Butler wrote back in 1993 is the theater of a war of cross extermination, and of ubiquitous rape. Misery, terror and fires erupt in all parts of the country. Moving from one point to another of the country is dangerous. Hate and terror everywhere.
In the actual American landscape a majority of people are sinking into senility, dementia, sadness and Fentanyl. No one, not even the greatest military power of all time can reverse the arrow of time.
In The Parable of the Sower Lauren Olamina is a girl who suffers from hyper-empathy: she feels pain when witnessing a human being in pain: this feeling is considered a pathology, and a liability.
“Hyperempathy is what the doctors call an organic delusional syndrome… I am supposed to share pleasure and pain. But there is not much pleasure around these days.” (p. 20)
As pain and sadness are everywhere, evolutionary adaptation has led the inhabitants of the country imagined by Octavia Butler to develop a total impermeability to the pain of others. But Lauren suffers from a pathological condition: while everyone is busy only surviving, stealing, killing, burning, Lauren has not stopped thinking. She understands because empathy is consciousness. And consciousness is dangerous. People know that life has turned into hell, and there is nothing to do but survive.
Almost all adults know it. They do not want to know, but they know it.
When there is no way out of an intolerable condition, what can we do but tolerate it? What can we do but try not to know the truth, even though we know it?
Disavowal: we know that climate change is destined to make life impossible on the only planet we have. We know it, but what can we do?
The only thing we can do is trying to escape the hell by deserting it.
This is what women are actually doing, in a conscious or unconscious move of avoidance of procreation that is leading the human kind to self-termination.
Avoid painful chaos and desert history.
Will it be the end of the world? Yes and no: human world will be continued by the cognitive automaton that we have built and we are building. From the point of view of evolution, the automaton is the winner because it knows no pain, no pleasure, no sensibility, and over all no thinking. Its job consists in recombining linguistic fragments aimed to the accumulation of capital. It is a simulation (almost perfect, never perfect) of thought: intelligence emancipated from consciousness.
Sad perfection
Since I wrote Cognitarian subjectivation (published in e-flux in 2010) I wondered about the possibility of autonomy in the ongoing process of subjugation of cognitive activity to Semio-capital. In the years of Occupy for the last time we could envision a process of social autonomy: cognitive workers of the world getting free from the big corporations and starting a process of social self-organization and of re-orientation of technology.
In 2017, when I wrote Futurability, I still believed in the possibility of autonomization of the cooperation of those cognitive workers who run the creation of the global automaton.
In the last pages of that book I wrote:
“Will poets and engineers find the energy to develop the possibilities inscribed in knowledge and technology in a condition of autonomy?”
I also wrote that “in the second decade of the twenty-first century two different processes are operating with apparently unstoppable force: the first is a global civil war that is ramping up since the year 2016; the second is the automation of cognitive activity, the penetration of AI devices into daily life and into the urban environment, paving the way to a euro-totalitarian system.” (Futurability).
The last sentence of the book, however, was the following:
“Building a common consciousness of a possible social solidarity among neuro-workers is the task for the next decade, and the ethical awakening of millions of engineers, artists and scientists is the only chance of averting a frightening regression, whose contours we are glimpsing already.” (Futurability, pag. 239).
A decade later it’s crystal clear: that possibility has been missed, and the possibility of autonomous subjectivation is vanishing because of three reasons: mental chaos, automation of mental activity, and evacuation of consciousness by the automated intelligence.
In order to enhance the productivity of intelligence, cognitive economy is replacing the human mind with intelligent automata free from the liability of consciousness; consequently mental activity is replaced by automated intelligence. As chaos swallows conscious life, only techno-linguistic automatisms enable the social conversation.
Since the eruption of the pandemic virus, social distancing has been embedded in the social sensibility, particularly of the young, while dementia takes over the senescent Western mind.
Automata are taking the upper hand: conscious conjunction is replaced by connection.
The spiral of chaos and automation is poised to be the overall trend of the century. Sentient organisms tend to disappear as the planetary game is basically ruled by intelligent entities impervious to consciousness and pain.
Sad perfection.
Perfect sadness.
Chaos and the brain
“We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.” (Deleuze Guattari: What is philosophy?, pag. 201)
“…Not only objective disconnections and disintegrations but all an immense weariness results in sensations, which have now become woolly, letting escape the elements and vibrations it finds increasingly difficult to contract. Old age is this very weariness: then, there is either a fall into mental chaos outside of the plane of composition or a falling-back on ready-made opinions, on cliches.” (What is philosophy?, pag. 214)
In my knowledge there is no better description of senility than this. The individual brain is facing two alternatives: either falling into mental chaos, or accepting the mainstream opinion, closing the mind and grasping to a fixed identity.
Since the end of the Twentieth Century, following the extension of life time and decreasing birthrate a sudden reversal of the previous demographic acceleration has occurred, and the share of seniors in the overall population has increased.
Chaos is just the projection of this kind of senility into the order of the world. The effect of this chaotization is the collapse and disintegration of the Western civilization.
The notion of West (Occident) is mythopoietically twofold: the frontier, the expansion, the tension toward a perpetual overcoming. But there is a second mythological stratum embedded in the notion of West: the dark side of the occidental self-perception is the metafore of decline.
Modern times were marked by the youthful and aggressive energy of the white conquerors and civilizers. The Twentieth Century’s culture intoned a triumphal song to speed, to the future and to war. In that period demographic acceleration resulted in a social scape full of young people: young workers ready for exploitation but also for revolution. Young soldiers ready for patriotic fights and colonial adventures. Fascism was the expression of these young multitudes led by young aggressive leaders.
The landscape has dramatically changed, filled with old men in their wheelchairs pushed by depressed forty years old caregivers who chat on the phone with their alcoholic husbands living five thousand kilometers away.
Fluctuating between panic and depression, obsessed by loneliness and humiliation, white culture is unable to deal with exhaustion: this is why white suprematism is back. Aggressiveness is a therapy for depression, but a dangerous therapy. It is pathetical, but also dangerous, because the aggressiveness of the Western elderly people is supported by hyper-powerful weapons. The technological ersatz has to compensate the fall of psycho-sexual energy, and of productive energy too. Let Samson die with all the Philistines.
Chaos does not exist out there. It is not a physical entity but a relation between the decaying mind and the accelerating Umwelt.
Chaos is the relation between the intensity and velocity of the neural stimuli that the brain is exposed to, and the available time for the elaboration of the neuro input. The more fast is the flow of info stimuli - images, sounds, words - the less time we have for the emotional and rational elaboration of the flow itself.
This is why the young mind is depressed and leans toward senility.
According to a famous Zen Master:
“Mind of the beginner many possibilities. Mind of the expert few possibilities.” (Suzuki).
The neural intensification purveyed by the Infosphere in the first decades of the century has provoked an acceleration of experience. Christian Nirvana Damato observes (Multiplication of Organs, 2024) that young people exposed to the ceaseless nervous stimulation are psychically exhausted, overwhelmed by the amount of meaningless data, by the saturation of their attention and imagination. Young people are old, the pyramid has been squared and it is on the way of tipping over.
Given this anthropological background we understand why rearmament is the keyword of the public discourse, in the white manosphere.
The Europeans seem particularly obsessed by the demise inscribed in the unstoppable trend of senescence. Emmanuel Macron declared that a military rearmament has to be accompanied by a demographic rearmament.
Aggressive dementia will not help to deal with the climate breakdown and the geopolitical disintegration. By way of genocide and by way of birth-strike the human kind is staging a Self-termination.
However it is not the end of the world, because the global cognitive automaton is rising.
sordid and terminal
A stream of disforia infiltrates the social psycho-sphere.
According to Paul Preciado “the contemporary epistemic and political condition is one of general dysphoria… This notion, close to the language of physics, points at a problem of overload, the stress of transporting something too heavy. For psychiatrists disphoria refers to a disturbance of the soul that makes daily life too hard to bear.”
Disforia implies sterilization of emotion and hyper-semiotization of desire.
Desire is invested in semiotic exchange: info-neural stimuli without presence of the other’s body enable dopamine reactions.
Sex avoidance obviously results into desertion from procreation. Far from being a pathology, this implies a (conscious and unconscious) strategy of soft self-termination of the human kind.
Reproductive dystopia is not new: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985) was centered about the necessity of submitting some women to the mandatory obligation of generating humans. But in the last few years writers, artists and film makers (particularly women authors) narrate a sordid, sinister world, in which there is no longer any reason to generate life.
Meanwhile, in the real world birthrate is falling almost everywhere in the world and the world population is entering a phase of senility. This trend has biological, environmental and cultural causes, but the feminine rejection of procreation is the most interesting of them. In the last decade or so many female authors are producing novels and movies in which a poetics of terminal sordidness is taking shape, linked with the prospect of suspending the reproduction of the human kind.
In 2018 I saw Capernaum, a film of the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. The movie stages the story of Zain, a 12-year-old Syrian refuge who lives in the slums of Beirut in the dire condition that we can imagine. Zain is detained for stabbing someone whom he refers to as a "son of a bitch”. When he is brought before a court, he tells the judge he wants to sue his parents. As the judge asks him why, he plainly answers: "Because I was born”.
Being born in this world of misery, violence and despair is a punishment that Zain has not deserved. Why did you do this to me?
After watching this movie I started thinking that this was the ultimate message of poetry.
Then came the pandemic virus, and social distancing was proclaimed for two years the new normal. Eventually war emerged as the main endeavor of the exhausted humanity. In the background it’s possible to glimpse the Earth ravaged by fire and submerged by floods.
Termination of the human race is a possible scenario for this century, but simultaneously intelligent machines take the place of command in the daily business of non-life. Chaos and the automaton. Sordidness and lifeless busyness.
The novels of Michel Houellebecq (I especially think of Aneantir) describe this horizon of exhaustion from the point of view of the senescent male of the West. But women are expressing a sentiment that is less resentful, almost placid. In the novels by Sakaya Murata the poetics of terminal sordidness emerges in full. Murata’s style is resonating with the Japanese culture of hikikomori: loneliness, isolation, sex avoidance.
A crucial innovation of Murata consists in her literary style: flat, almost robotic. Boring, if you want. Nothing in these novels is intended to please the reader, nothing sounds dramatic. Romanticism is dedicated to anime characters; fictional beings and virtual animations can be loved without bodily interaction.
Disgust at the presence of the other, rejection of marriage, sexlessness, and consequently declining birthrate. A trend toward the end of the fleshy humanity. No emotion, no anger, no political critique, only distancing from social life and from erotic involvement, radical desertion from the future.
Eroticism has disappeared from life and from language.
While narration is emptied of drama, while intensity is banned, the body is subjected to a process of alignment with the connective machine.
In the novels of Murata it is possible to detect a sort of autistic pathology, however I don’t think that we should read the Murata’s novels in psychopathological terms. Autistic syndrome is more and more systemic in the meaningless existence that people are obliged to live.
Sex and pleasure diverge; at most sex is a social obligation that must be fulfilled. Marriage is a socially normal behavior devoid of desire and of pleasure.
in the best selling of her books, The girl of the convenience store, Keoki has lost touch with her body up to the point of questioning the existence of a self. Keoki is so distant from the perception of her own bodily existence that she does not know how to act, where to stay and what to do. Only by following protocols, exact procedures she manages to orientate in the environment. The routine of the convenience store is her lifeline.
Murata writes with affection of the music of konbini, of the reverberating sweetish sounds of the convenience store. She feels an intimate repugnance for any contact with other people, unless they are regimented in their roles.
An aesthetic of sordidness is taking shape in some regions of contemporary literature: living in the digital environment has deprived existence of eroticism, displacing desire from the body to the electronic neural stimulation. Connection has replaced conjunction and the outcome is digital glaciation.
Literature and art, particularly feminine, intercept this an-erotic effect. A sordid landscape is emerging everywhere, except in the icy environment of disembodied communication.
In these last years I’ve read novels of women (especially women) like Melinda July and Melissa Broder, Cho Nam Joo, Sakaya Murata and Sara Mesa.
In Melissa Broder's stories, sexuality is but an attempt to fill an anxious void, a game of language that no longer provoke excitement, since real bodies have vanished, and the body has become only a linguistic referent, an allusion, a promise that is always postponed and ultimately unattainable.
Procreation is seen as an abuse, an act without emotion and therefore sordid, a sinister effect of intimate void.
“Nobody asks to be born. No one signs a form that says, you have my permission to make me exist. Babies are born, because parents feel that they themselves are not enough. So, parents, never condemn us for trying to fill our existential holes, when we are but the fruit of your vain attempts to fill yours. It’s your fault we are here to deal with the void in the first place.” (How to never be enough, in So Sad Today, 5).
The Spanish Sara Mesa writes with unemotional style of young girls and old men who meet on the backstage of ruined cities, of emptied neighborhoods, on the backstage of an exhausted life.
In Oposicion, 2025 she describes social life as a bureaucratic dimension in which long deals of time are expended in producing a metaphysical nihil through application of high technological resources.
Her characters, like those by Murata, are in the process of losing any contact with the body, in a condition of unspeakable disforia.
The background of her stories is often a decaying city (Incendios invisibles). The relation with men is based on sordid approaches, (Un amor), and sexuality is relegated to a nebulous, indistinct dimension, devoid of eroticism and joy.
According to David Spiegelhalter, author of Sex by numbers (2015) the frequency of sexual contacts has steadily fallen in the last few decades: in the ‘90s they were on average five per month among couples of all ages. Then, in the first decade of the 2000s, it seems that sexual contacts were four every month. In the second decade of the century, the sexual contacts seem to be 2.5 every month. Spiegelhalter’s research stops in 2015, but you can bet that after the Covid induced social distancing sexual contacts have fallen further, and tend to zero.
Sex is swiftly disappearing from the forms of life of our century.
A few years ago I read a text written by a 19 year old American man called Ryan Hoover: (his post was full of interesting emoticons and the message was incredibly ironic, and sharp, and incredibly nice, in a sense):
“I grew up with computers and the internet, shaping my world view and relationships. I’m considered a “digital native”. Technology often brings us together but it has also spread generations apart. Try calling a millennial on the phone. Soon, future generations will be born into an AI world. Kids will form real, intimate relationships with artificial beings. And in many cases, these replicants will be better than real people. They’ll be smarter, kinder, more interesting. Will “AI natives” seek human relationships? Will they have sex?”
Why should we have sex with humans? They are brutal, less and less interesting, less and less nice. AI objects are much kinder, much more civilized, much more interesting.
The more we interact with these “technological aliens”, the more we become brutal, and uninteresting, and bad. Conversely, the more those aliens take part in the relation with human beings, with young, ironic, interesting human beings like Ryan Hoover, the more those aliens will be interesting for us.
Probably this is the way to abandon the horror of history in: suspending reproduction, stopping to generate the victims of the hell of climate collapse and of global civil war.
The Era of the automaton
The digital mutation of the environment has changed the relationship between self-perception, projection of the world of experience, conception and execution of the act: the cognitive activity of those who have been formatted by the connective linguistic automaton tend to perceive their own body in a dysphoric way, and to project a phantasmatic world: the relationship between conception and execution of the act contracts because the mental processing circuit passage to the act is accelerated by the uninterrupted neural stimulation.
More and more stimuli - less and less time for the emotional and cognitive processing of the stimuli.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, brain-rot is the word of the year 2024, because it seems that in the universal network the use of this word has multiplied by 230%. This word seems to correspond to the self-perception of the contemporary young population. After brain-rot comes Romantasy, a literary genre in which tenderness and affection are only virtual fantasy. In third place is the word demure, that could be translated as reserved, shy, perhaps solitary. There could be no better psychopathological diagnosis than a generation that has learned life as fiction, or as terror.
In schools all over the world, psychiatrists diagnose attention deficit disorder. A diagnosis that simply signals a disorder, but does not grasp its context, its genesis, its possible evolution.
Should we speak of psychopathy or of a cognitive mutation?
I don’t know if human beings are getting more and more stupid while chatbots are learning to think in their place. Certainly some intellectual ability will be lost as we can leave it to the linguistic machine. And consciousness, the ability to make ethical and aesthetic choices seems destined to be evacuated in the pursue of the optimization of intelligence.
The evacuation of consciousness may be a result of the process of alignment.
The techno-corporations whose business is essentially the management of mind have discussed of alignment in the last few years.
The linguistic machine, they say, must align with the human values (hard to exactly identify, and probably inexistent). But I think the contrary is true: the human mind has been obliged to align with the rhythm of the cognitive machine that expands in every field of creation and exchange. The minds of the young generation have been formatted in the digital environment, so that their cognitive reactivity has been modeled according to patterns that have nothing to do with critical discrimination and ethical consciousness.
In the struggle for survival environment the evacuation of consciousness enhances the competitive potency of intelligence.
In terms of competition the ethical judgement is a loss of time, and the evacuation of thought is the completion of the process that finally clears the planet of the imperfect.
In October 2024 Paul Graham commented on the humans' loss of writing ability.
https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
He starts from the consideration that the intelligent automaton is more and more doing the work of writing for us.
What should expect from this replacement of writing ability?
According to Plato writing was destined to erase memory from the minds of humans. It happened indeed, but only at a limited extent: writing transformed memory, it didn't erase it.
But now machines are not only capable of replacing writing, but also of replacing reasoning. Writing in fact enables the logical organization of thought. Losing the ability to write (that is actually happening on a massive scale) means losing the ability to think in critical and logical terms.
If the human population is entering a phase of aging and dumbification, if it is going to disappear, don’t panic. The planet will be run by the perfect heirs of the human kind: free from the burden of ethical conscience and sensibility, free from pain and pleasure, intelligent and ruthless automatons will do the useless work of producing and reproducing the eternity of capital.
May 2025