Dr. Patrick Gamez recently published his first monograph, Posthumanism meets Surveillance Capitalism: How to Delete the Manifest Image, with Palgrave Macmillan. Dr. Gamez’s book is among the first to put posthumanist philosophy into conversation with contemporary research into the ways in which AI is deployed to surveil, predict, and modify human behavior. Moving from debates into the nature of mental content to the history of the so-called “socialist calculation debate,” the wide-ranging discussion engages with an array of thinkers, arguments, and concepts that have shaped how we think of the world and the place of the mind within it.
Fundamentally, Dr. Gamez inquires into what the prospects of AI are for human, or posthuman, liberation. Posthumanists tend to think that new and emerging technologies are valuable tools for escaping the constraints of our cultural, political, and evolutionary histories. To the contrary, Dr. Gamez argues that the use of AI in the practices of contemporary surveillance capitalism reveals a striking nihilism, raising deep questions about how we construe minds at all.
Published in the Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and Its Successors series, this work is sure to spark debate about the limits of artificial intelligence and human self-understanding well into the future.