A Portrait of the Artist as an Emergent Technology

Abstract

This paper is about the birth of an author. It is about the contested terrain of authority, not as a debate between human readers and writers engaged in philosophical conflit over the relationship between individuals and their respective societies, but about the very termination of philosophical debate between individuals as the terrain of culture in an age of artificial intelligence. Weaving through a history of the subject in the social sciences and arriving at end point of the cybernetic relationship between surveillance and machine intelligence, this paper posits that the human as become a text, and the machinic apparatus its reader and writer. In other words, this paper is about reading and writing after the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its implications for our understanding of the human person, or anthropology.