Ninth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence has been considered a challenge to accepted categories of human civilization since it was first discussed in a 1956 scientific meeting in the US at a Dartmouth Summer Research Project. In the nearly 70 years since that definitional meeting, the scope of concerns continues to expand, most recently finding expression in a moral panic with many constituents. This paper will briefly consider the history of moral panics in response to media innovation, suggesting that this one prompted by recent AI innovation is in fact real. Real here is used in the sense in which it was proposed by Jacques Lacan in his psychoanalytical theory: that The Real is the expression of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, both finding their realization in a material object. If AI is the object, it can be considered Real yet immediately meets a contradiction because due to its self-reproducing capacities, it is moving beyond human imagination to The Singularity: the incorporation of all things into digital form and meaning. The Real as Singularity is at the point of not being controlled by humans, yet it is owned by private corporations whose idea of The Real/Singularity is a totalizing system of AI machines. A few critics have pointed the way to the foundations of this Real moral panic, with implication for human life.