Jan Overwijk (Bio)

Artificial, incommunicable: the cybernetic rationalization of work

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has stirred up the conversation on the future of cybernetic technology. Newsfeeds are now filled with speculations on how AI will change economic life and how it will impact the work environment. Yet artificial intelligence does not come out of nowhere. Long before ChatGPT, the neoliberal work process and economic management came to be modeled after a cybernetic logic that precedes and informs current large language models (LLMs). This presentation will detail how the post-Fordist labor process follows a logic of what I call cybernetic rationalization. It starts by presenting the case of Thomas Ray’s artificial life (AL) program Tierra. It then tracks the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist work through a series of paradoxes. Cybernetic rationalization, I will argue, is a paradoxical mode of governmentality: it is setting parameters of communication that aims to seduce and harness a system’s incommunicability.