Category Research Essays

Artificial intelligence and power depicted as a lone figure navigating a vast monitored institutional space.

Intelligence as a Social System

Artificial intelligence is not merely a technological capability. Its development depends on control over compute, data, models and the institutions that decide what counts as knowledge, intelligence and authority. This essay examines AI as a social system in which technology, economic interests and symbolic power become structurally inseparable.

What makes us human in the age of AI: a woman and a humanoid robot face each other across a glass divide.

The Human Boundary

As machines acquire capacities once treated as uniquely human, the boundary of personhood becomes harder to defend through intelligence, language or creativity alone. This essay asks whether what matters instead lies in consciousness, continuity, responsibility and the relational practices through which persons are recognised.

AI creativity represented by a lone figure moving beneath a vast computational structure in a dark architectural space

Creativity After Generative AI

When machines can generate images, texts and music, the old idea of creativity as the expression of a single author begins to fracture. This essay traces that fracture through Kant, Barthes, Foucault, Boden and Dickie, asking what remains once generation, intention and institutional recognition no longer coincide.

Artificial intelligence represented by a monumental human face dissolving into fragments beside a solitary figure.

The Language Problem

Language models can master linguistic structure and participate in human linguistic practice. Whether their words refer to anything beyond that structure is a different question.

Machine understanding: a solitary figure facing a monumental opening filled with natural light

The Architecture of Intelligence

Understanding does not emerge at the end of a cognitive pipeline. Perception, memory, representation, language, inference, learning and context continuously constrain one another. This essay examines that architecture and proposes a different way to evaluate intelligence in humans and artificial systems.

The Machine Question

Artificial intelligence does not simply create new machines. It forces us to reconsider what intelligence means, how we define understanding, and which assumptions about human cognition remain valid in an age of artificial systems.