Luca M. Possati is a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) and a research affiliate at the University of Rome LUMSA (Italy).
Educated as philosopher, he has been researcher and lecturer at the University of Porto (Portugal) and Institut Catholique (France), and associate researcher of the Fonds Ricoeur and EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales).
His research focuses on philosophy of technology and AI, technology assessment, AI ethics, and ethics of quantum technologies. He also works in the field of software studies.
He has published numerous papers and books on phenomenology, and history of contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Algorithmic Unconscious. How Psychoanalysis Helps in Understanding AI (Routledge, 2021).
His full academic CV, including publications and other research output, is here
Unconscious Networks (Routledge 2022)
This book develops an original theoretical framework for understanding human-technology relations. The author’s approach, which he calls technoanalysis, analyzes artificial intelligence based on Freudian psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and Latour’s actor-network theory.
On-line course on Sloterdijk
Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
Winter School 2022
Psychoanalyzing AI - article
Psychoanalyzing artificial intelligence: the case of Replika. AI & Soc (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01379-7
Interview on Transhumanism - Daily Philosophy
Transhumanism is a general worldview that implies a certain evaluation of human nature and the relationship between human nature and technology. We can find transhumanist ideas in literature, art, cinema, but also in politics or science.
Books
This book develops an original theoretical framework for understanding human-technology relations. The author’s approach, which he calls technoanalysis, analyzes artificial intelligence based on Freudian psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and Latour’s actor-network theory.
How can we communicate with AI to determine shared values and objectives? And what, ultimately, do we want from machines? These are crucial questions in our world, where the influence of AI-based technologies is rapidly growing. Unconscious dynamics influence AI and digital technology and understanding them is essential to better controlling AI systems. This book’s unique methodology— which combines psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, and actor-network theory—reveals a radical reformulation of the problem of the human mind. Technoanalysis views the mind as a hybrid network of humans and nonhuman actants in constant interaction with one another. The author argues that human unconscious dynamics influence and shape technology, just as technology influences and shapes human unconscious dynamics. He proceeds to show how this conception of the relationship between the unconscious and technology can be applied to social robotics and AI.
Unconscious Networks will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in philosophy of technology, philosophy of artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and science and technology studies.
“In this illuminating book, Luca M. Possati explores the unconscious dimension of Artificial Intelligence. Its main thesis is that in the age of big data and self-learning neural networks ‘machine behavior’ has become dark and impenetrable and is in need for interpretation. Combining Lacanian psychoanalysis and Latour’s actor-network theory the author offers an original and timely analysis of how we project our deepest desires in AI technologies and pleas for a new ‘subcortical AI’.”
This book claims that continental philosophy gives us a new understanding of digital technology, and software in particular; its main thesis being that software is like a text, so it involves a hermeneutic process. A hermeneutic understanding of software allows us to explain those aspects of software that escape a strictly technical definition, such as the relationship with the user, the human being, and the social and cultural transformations that software produces. The starting point of the book is the fracture between living experience and the code. In the first chapter, the author argues that the code is the origin of the digital experience, while remaining hidden, invisible. The second chapter explores how the software can be seen as a text in Ricoeur’s sense. Before being an algorithm, code or problem solving, software is an act of interpretation. The third chapter connects software to the history of writing, following Kittler’s suggestions. The fourth chapter unifies the two parts of the book, the historical and the theoretical, from a Kantian perspective. The central thesis is that software is a form of reflective judgment, namely, digital reflective judgement.
