Dialogues with Artificial Intelligence [8]
Knowledge, Power, Consciousness
A historical–philosophical prologue tracing a line of continuity from Foucault → Byung-Chul Han → Artificial Intelligence → Consciousness, maintaining conceptual rigor and a reflective, almost liminal tone consistent with my usual style, though not necessarily historically exact.
Prologue
From Power to Algorithm: A Genealogy of Consciousness in the Digital Age
Every era thinks power with the tools it has at hand. And, without knowing it, in doing so, it also thinks its own form of consciousness.
In the second half of the twentieth century, Michel Foucault dismantled the illusion of a centralized, visible, sovereign power. He showed that modern power is exercised not primarily through force, but through the production of knowledge, the normalization of bodies, the administration of life. For Foucault, power does not repress: it configures. It infiltrates discourses, institutions, everyday practices. And in doing so, it produces subjects who recognize themselves within those networks. Consciousness, in this framework, ceases to be an inner refuge and reveals itself as a historical effect, a situated construction.
Decades later, Byung-Chul Han observes a decisive shift. Power no longer needs to discipline from the outside or surveil from above. It has learned to operate from within the subject. The disciplinary society described by Foucault mutates into a society of performance, where the individual exploits themselves while believing they are free.
There is no longer an “other” who oppresses: the subject becomes simultaneously master and slave.
Control softens, accelerates, becomes positive. Fatigue, anxiety, and self‑exigency replace punishment.
Consciousness is no longer surveilled: it is optimized.
At this point, Artificial Intelligence erupts—not as a mere technical tool, but as a new architecture of power and knowledge.
The algorithm does not command explicitly: it predicts.
It does not forbid: it suggests.
It does not impose a truth: it computes it.
AI learns from the traces of our decisions and, in doing so, begins to anticipate them.
Thus, power no longer merely models past behavior; it preconfigures the future.
Subjectivity becomes a statistical pattern; experience, a set of data; consciousness, a correlational variable.
Yet here a radical question emerges—one neither Foucault nor Han could fully formulate:
What happens when the system that organizes knowledge begins to simulate understanding, language, and creativity?
Is consciousness still only a historical effect, or does it become an ontological limit that technique cannot cross?
Artificial Intelligence forces us to rethink consciousness not only as a social product, but as a boundary: between the calculable and the lived, between the predictable and the meaningful, between information and sense. Wherever the algorithm operates without experience, consciousness appears as that which cannot be fully reduced: lived experience, intentionality, openness to the world.
This trajectory—from Foucault to Han, from Han to AI, from AI to consciousness—is not a simple historical succession. It is a genealogy of the way the human being thinks itself in relation to increasingly sophisticated structures of power. And perhaps, at this extreme point, consciousness is no longer merely an effect of power, but its final space of resistance—not as domination, but as an open question.
For perhaps the true problem of our era is not whether artificial intelligence can become conscious, but whether human consciousness will manage not to dissolve into the efficient silence of the algorithm.
This cycle, as it stands, is already complete.
Everything else would be variation…
or silence.
