Stephanie Dick (2023), “The Marxist in the machine”, Osiris 38, p. 61-81
So many Enlightenment thinkers and their intellectual descendants suggested that our knowledge must be a product of that universal reasoning faculty. Anything produced otherwise would not, in fact, be knowledge. But if that faculty is a myth, a fiction, and quite inhuman, in fact, as Wang suggests, then we are in trouble: knowledge is only as good as we can be inhuman in its production. Knowledge is what follows from the turn of the crank, the suppression of so much of what human life and experience actually entail. That vision of knowledge and knowledge production, which has been enshrined in AI, is a recipe for alienation. We have witnessed the effects of that alienation across social and political life in recent years, reaching what Lorraine Daston has called “ground-zero empiricism,” in which, contrary to the confident claims from technocrats and experts about how knowledge should be produced, circulated, and applied to organized society, people are realizing that “there [is] no settled script for how to go about knowing.” The demand that people separate their minds from their worlds, from their bodies, from their feelings, from their realities, in order to produce knowledge, not only is alienating but may in fact be a root cause of some of the deepest social, political, and psychological suffering of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/725135
