Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, the company behind generative artificial intelligence model ChatGPT, released a statement on February 24th regarding the short-term and long-term prospects of their invention. Although well-intentioned, many technologists were perturbed by its tone – it felt as though Altman expected the world to change to suit the interests of the company, rather than the company opening itself up to social and political regulation to accommodate itself to our world. But what is ChatGPT and why is it causing concern? ChatGPT is arguably the first successful generative model of artificial general intelligence. As a large-language model, it offers several advantages over its competitors and predecessors. Firstly, ChatGPT is trained on a massive amount of data, a corpus …

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher notorious for his public spat with Jurgen Habermas, his proclamation that critical theory died in the 1990’s (much to the chagrin of Axel Honneth and other contemporary custodians of the tradition), and his gigantic three-volume Spheres trilogy, in which he presents a polemical and holistic philosophy of being, space and nature. The recent English translation of the trilogy has piqued the interest of theorists working on the interdisciplinary problems of culture, ecology and technology. His philosophical anthropology charting of the history of humanity’s self-organisation, specifically his account of “society as foam,” provides an intriguing challenge to the methodological assumptions that underpins much contemporary political theory. In the third and final volume, Sloterdijk offers a …

When political theorists debate the nature of the ‘political’, it strikes the ear as strange. Conventionally, we understand politics in a general sense to mean the practice of power relations, or the relationships between people and governing institutions, or the discursive distribution of power and resources, and although there are often disagreements about the precise definition, there is sufficient overlap that academics understand one another when they talk about politics as a subject of inquiry. However, when talking about ‘the political’, as it is so abstractly articulated in certain areas of the literature, there seems to be far more debate, with supposedly more at stake. ‘The political’ appears to denote some sort of primordial state of things, or an ingredient …