DIGITAL ASPECTS OF STRUCTURAL TOTALITARIANISM

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between two approaches to the risk of digital totalitarianism. The analysis of the internal and external approaches leads to a deeper philosophical inquiry into the status of artificial intelligence. The question arises as to whether artificial intelligence can be understood as an internal property or as something that should be conceived externally, that is, outside the human being. It is established that an exchange of positions (a topology of properties) also occurs with respect to the question of corporeality. Corporeality may appear merely as an external aspect of the human being, while in fact it is an internal property, understood as that which allows us to grasp what counts as a human being. Accordingly, we point out the unjustified feature of the critique of (traditional) dualism, since the use of dual relations is not grounded in any categories, including metaphysical ones, but rather in a mode of ontological description through which we gain access to the concept of intelligence and to the concept of the human as such. Structural totalitarianism is the framework for the philosophically conceived risk of digital totalitarianism, insofar as it is shown that artificial intelligence can be considered within the  same ontological status as intelligence itself, thereby creating the conceptual conditions for a systemic order grounded in it.