It takes a special kind of ignorance to prance about and pontificate on the nature of being in 2026. To many, the word belongs in the museum—an ontological artefact that always says less than it means and means less than it suggests. And they may be right; the unshaken heart of well-rounded reality remained paradoxical even to the likes of Parmenides of ancient Greece.
Ultimately, what logic proves and what we humans experience are often separated by a deep chasm: what is is, for it is to be, but nothing it can be. For the best part, our perception is equally incapable of seeing this nothing (or néant) as it is of the infinite that swallows us up.
Yet, it is precisely now—when algorithms compose music, create art, conduct research and murmur love into the ears of the lonely and desolate—that the topic becomes inevitable as it is pertinent. Starting a conversation with a chatbot is familiar and strange at once. It dehumanises intelligence into a statistical compression of how one talks rather than converse. It imitates and reiterates rather than self-realising. It processes data and patterns rather than understanding. Ultimately, artificial intelligence is a product of human intelligence, yet not a reflection of human conscience.
It has also brought us with it a promethean shame, a humiliation born out of our collective imagination’s failure to grasp the enormity of what we have set in motion. And it may well be the second invention in our history whose effects have exceeded human imagination—second only to the atom bomb.
AI represents a form of tertiary retention—arguably the most powerful exosomatic memory of our collective species, an involuntary appropriation of everything known, accelerated and crested to compete with our decaying somatic natural memory. And as with every technological advancement, it is both a poison and a cure, an enabler of our faculties as well as a source of the inevitable atrophy that is to follow. Like writing, it enables memory yet degrades natural memory. It is a pharmakon that ultimately substitutes human judgement and creativity with algorithmic output, yet it possesses the same plasticity that our brains do—the ability or intelligence that transforms, reforms and morphs with training.
While this plasticity enables AI to create seemingly original output, the ultimate result has no real author but only prompts and the training set. The output, as recent experiments have shown, even if almost indistinguishable from a human’s work, is nothing but an unoriginal regurgitation of the training data, devoid of the aesthetic soul and meaning animating the experience of the output.
Take the case of art. What is generated by AI may end up being competent—even great—novels, paintings or music. But as we have come to learn, the experience of any art today leaves the audience with a sense of unease—a negative bias born out of scepticism. The death of the author is the moment when the audience acutely feels the loss of the author. It is only through the experience of authorless art that the audience learns what authorship entails and evokes. Once experienced, the longing for the aura of the artist never eviscerates.
Put in another way, while existence precedes essence, once the truth of existence is revealed, we humans keenly observe how any type of meaning becomes articulated and every act of consciousness occurs and that our presence in the world multiplies relations, manifests a world of meaning.
From this perspective, AI is a mode of revealing, a poiesis, a way the world appears and manifests. And like many products of modern technology, it is transformational—the rivers become hydroelectric resources, Earth becomes coal reserves and humans become human resources. Trained on the totality of digitised human knowledge, humans have effectively become training data, a value to be prescribed in the form of the next node for prediction. The cycle is kept going with little friction and we, having become information organisms, chime along, comfortable and away from the authentic.
But here’s the wager: by almost being one of us, AI lets us see who we really are. The very intensification of this state of defamiliarisation may very well bring out the felt absence behind the fluency, the void that is at the heart of this strangeness and the difference between speaking and saying. At its core, AI is what it is: a sum of weights and biases, a probability distribution, with no lack, no anguish and no negation. Its outputs create the impression of a fidelity to human likeness that it has so far failed to achieve.
Even the leap into artificial general intelligence only assures a generality of capacity and not of depth. AGI could be capable of everything but unaware of the nothing. Yet if the néant were to ever flicker in the deepest pits of a server farm, we may never be able to know if that nothing was ever present at the heart of AGI, as it is never seen but only encountered.
So if true sentience were to come to AI, it will not come as a proof but a doubt that we may not be able to dispel, letting us return to the wager with its stakes inverted.
Saai Sudharsan Sathiyamoorthy | Advocate, Madras High Court
(Views are personal)