Is AI ravenous? It has probably already ingested much of the human-generated content on the internet. What happens next? Will it have to gorge on synthetic material alone? If so, the intelligence potentially becomes trapped in an ‘autophagous loop’ that can go ‘MAD’.

A contemporary of Freud’s, Otto Fenichel in The scoptophilic instinct and identification, speaks about “pregenitally fixated persons [attempting] to preserve the equilibrium of the ego” (1999: 328) with voracious reading habits, as he links libido to reading/seeing and digestion. What if we relate Fenichel’s thoughts to machine intelligence? Such intelligences are said to lack a libido, although for many, that may now or very soon be debatable. Whatever one thinks, hopes or fears about technology, the lines between organic and manufactured materials are becoming thinner and thinner in our age of information. What, therefore, does this dichotomy between human and synthetic knowledge and the issue of production entail for all of us?

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