Conclusion

Whereas the epistemology of science and technology has often given emphasis to the organism–machine analogy of early modernity, this essay has tried to shift the focus to another key analogy of late modernity, the language–machine analogy. This analogy was grounded by heuristic technologies such as the telegraph and disciplines such as linguistics, and then evolved into information technologies, digital computers and eventually AI. The two perspectives and polarities of the language–machine analogy—language as machine and machine as language—have crossed the last century, and are part of the same history of formalisation and automation of labour. Language, understood as labour and more precisely as the abstraction of the social division of labour, constitutes the fabric of the machine. Language, however, far from being merely a formalisable and automatable system, remains the space of collective and political agency: one cannot miss, in the mid-2020s, the politicisation of LLMs for ideological propaganda and cultural hegemony. Global cultural wars have been declared along the deep neural networks of AI models. How should critical theory respond to this scale of power that AI systems came to embody? The present essay proposed a historical and comparative epistemology of the paradigms of machine, organism and language to rediscover their role in the genealogy of AI as configurations of labour and society at large. This genealogy will, hopefully, open the way to imagining new forms of political intervention in the constitution of AI models as mirrors of the social order.