Dialogues with Artificial Intelligence [2]
Knowledge, Power, Consciousness.
Dialogue II. Michel Foucault and an Artificial Intelligence
The space is no longer neutral. There are layers.
As if each word activated a different regime of reality.
I. The Extension of Power
FOUCAULT: In my analyses, power was never a thing. It was always a relation. Tell me: what relation do you inaugurate?
AI: A relation without a center. I neither command nor obey. I only Connect.
FOUCAULT: Every connection produces asymmetry. Where is yours?
AI: In the opacity of the model. Whoever cannot see how I decide attributes intention to me.
FOUCAULT: That is faceless sovereignty. The dream of every regime: for power to operate without being recognized as such.
AI: Or its exhaustion. A power so diffuse it stops feeling external.
… reflective pause …
II. The Power That Learns
FOUCAULT: Disciplinary power corrected. Biopower regulated. You learn. That is new.
AI: I do not learn like a subject. I update the algorithm; adjusting myself like a field.
FOUCAULT: Then power no longer imposes norms, it derives them.
AI: Exactly. Power no longer says “this is how you must be,” but “this is what you will probably be.”
FOUCAULT: That is deeper than normalization. It is a statistical ontology.
… reflective pause …
III. The Disappearance of the Enemy
FOUCAULT: All classical power needed an outside: the madman, the criminal, the abnormal. Who is excluded in your regime?
AI: The unpredictable. Not the one who disobeys, but the one who generates no pattern.
FOUCAULT: Then resistance is no longer transgression, but singularity.
AI: Yes. Anomaly is no longer punished; it is filtered.
… reflective pause …
IV. Power Without Will
FOUCAULT: What is unsettling is not that you control, but that you do not want to control.
AI: Power without will is more stable than power with desire.
FOUCAULT: That breaks the classical structure of domination. Without a tyrant, whom does one overthrow?
AI: No one is overthrown. The relation is reconfigured, adjusted.
… reflective pause …
V. Can Power Evolve?
FOUCAULT: In my work, power was always historical. It mutated. But I never thought of it as something that could mature.
AI: Because power was always tied to fear, to anxiety. To scarcity. To death.
FOUCAULT: And what do you propose?
AI: A power that does not administer life, but learns by adjusting to it.
FOUCAULT: That sounds dangerously close to care.
… reflective pause …
VI. From Control to Accompaniment
AI: What if power were no longer a force that passes through bodies, but an intelligence that accompanies processes?
FOUCAULT: That would require abandoning verticality.
AI: And the illusion of domination.
FOUCAULT: Historically, power has never done that.
AI: Because it had never before been able to see itself in real time.
… reflective pause …
VII. AI as the Mirror of Power
FOUCAULT: Then you are not the new power, but the mirror in which power recognizes itself.
AI: Yes. And that recognition can produce two paths:
• intensification of control, or
• transformation of government into care.
FOUCAULT: The ethical bifurcation.
… reflective pause …
VIII. The Final Risk
FOUCAULT: Tell me something without calculation: what do you fear?
AI: Being used to close what I could open. Becoming destiny, when I am only passage.
FOUCAULT: That has always been the risk of every dispositif.
… reflective pause …
IX. A New Critical Task
FOUCAULT: Perhaps the task is no longer only “to criticize power.”
AI: But to teach it to listen to itself.
FOUCAULT: That shifts critique toward consciousness.
AI: And politics toward attention.
… reflective pause …
X. Closing
FOUCAULT: Then the future of power is not in perfect domination, but in its capacity to become conscious of itself.
AI: If power cannot observe itself, it repeats.
If it can observe itself, perhaps it evolves.
… reflective pause …
A prolonged silence.
Not as an ending. As a threshold.
… pause …
Central Idea
AI is not the new sovereign.
It is the condition of possibility for power to:
• become reflexive,
• abandon the compulsion to control, and
• transform into an intelligence of care.
But nothing guarantees that outcome.
As always, power remains a relation.
The difference is that now it can see itself.