Three AI era races. Rated subjectivity

Artificial intelligence is with us for good. Algorithms recommending movies, credit rating systems, medical image analysis tools – all of this has been in usage for a long time and works quietly in the background of our regular lives. But it wasn't until November 2022 – erstwhile the public release of the ChatGPT version took place – AI truly went under the roof. She ceased to be a substance of engineers, researchers and technological companies, and became a subject of conversation at the kitchen table, began to be seriously discussed in public administration offices or at board meetings.

In just over 3 years, AI has become 1 of the main issues of business, political and private life.

There are immense hopes – for increased productivity, breakthroughs in science, access to cognition that we have not yet had. He besides has serious concerns – about jobs, about the autonomy of man, about the quality of information in the public space, about the very tissue of human relationships. Most of the public talk about AI revolves around 1 of these 2 poles or attempts to balance them.

However, under these hopes and fears 1 can feel something else – the impression that we have been put into motion by a force greater than us. That we're adapting to conditions we haven't set. That even AI enthusiasts talk of her as the weather – something that just happens and needs to be tuned into.

It is worth looking at this impression, due to the fact that it is important. It is simply a informing signal for losing subjectivity.

AI has ceased to be only a technological tool and has become a force shaping the debate on work, knowledge, relations and human autonomy. The most crucial question, however, is not whether we can keep up with it, but whether we will begin to lose our own subjectivity in the adaptation process.

Three races in which we participate

AI, in the form we have known since the end of 2022, forces us to compete in 3 parallel races. Each has its own logic, its participants, its own stakes. Everyone besides makes the same uncomfortable impression: that we run, although we cannot say that we signed up for this run.

The first is simply a skill race. all fewer months a fresh model appears, a fresh tool, a fresh method of working with AI. You gotta learn all the time, adjust, refresh your skills. Office workers, programmers, doctors, lawyers, teachers – everyone hears they gotta run to avoid falling behind. The subject of the “competence of the future” appears in corporations, ministries, universities. The labour marketplace seems to be accelerating, and with it the force on everyone on this marketplace is increasing. This is the most visible race, the 1 most talked about and written about.

The second is simply a race for judgment. If AI can do so much – compose texts, analyse data, program, solve logical problems – the key competence becomes the ability to decide what to do. What we should be posting to the machine, what to keep to ourselves, what questions to ask, where to look for values. The judgement moves from execution to direction. It's a race deeper than the first, due to the fact that it's not about keeping track of tool changes anymore, it's about keeping a compass in a planet where performance becomes inexpensive and choice is expensive.

The 3rd is an identity race.What does it mean to be human erstwhile a device can talk to us so that it is hard to separate its answer from human? erstwhile does he make images, music, lyrics to which the question “who did it?” ceases to have a clear answer? But that's a surface. Under it there is something more serious: man himself changes his abilities, his attention, his thought of what is worthy of attention. A brain that stops writing itself loses any efficiency. The imagination that ceases to face an empty card loses any creative strength. This race cannot be won by spending time, money or another goods. The stakes are not what we choose, but what we become at the same time – and whether we will always be the authors of our own life.

Each of these 3 races is real. Everyone's asking us hard questions. But erstwhile you look at the way in which – in the media, in manufacture debates, in private conversations – we talk about them, you can see something disturbing. Most of this conversation is simply a language in which AI is an actor. "AI imposes tempo". "AI requires". "AI changes". "AI redefines". Grammarally, technology has become a subject of sentences, and we – runners in the races proposed by it.

And the runner, as you know, doesn't set the rules. He doesn't choose the route. He doesn't decide on rewards. He can only run faster or slower, smarter or desperate. Its function is, strictly speaking, the subject matter. The runner runs, although he chose neither the way nor the target.

It is this dimension of the AI era that most escapes us – due to the fact that it is written in the very way of discussing it. This is not the dimension of circumstantial threats (loss of work, misinformation, concentration of power) or concrete hopes (increase in productivity, advancement in medicine). This is simply a deeper dimension: the condition of an individual who speaks of himself as if he had already agreed to be an object.

The AI era forces us to run in 3 races at the same time: for competence, judgement and identity, but the most crucial stake is deeper – in the behaviour of subjectivity. erstwhile we start talking about technology as a force that “imposes”, “requires” and “changes”, it is easy to overlook the minute erstwhile we become only objects of the process.

And this is not a trivial matter. due to the fact that the difference between being an entity and being an object is 1 of the most crucial differences a individual can consider in relation to himself. Philosophical and spiritual traditions have for millennia called it the difference between authorship and subjection. Modern psychology speaks of the feeling of perp as a foundation of intellectual health. The belief that citizens are actors, not governance facilities, is the foundation of democratic policy.

If we are talking about AI as if it were working through us, then we are already faced with a much higher cost than the failure of respective professions or the request for retraining. We are dealing with voluntary, although undetected, giving up subjectivity. And that's the real AI rate.

However, the substance has a deeper dimension, due to the fact that in reality it is not the AI that deprives us of subjectivity.

Who truly gives the pace

Although it is said that it is ‘AI imposes’, in practice it is not done by AI. Then who?

The question seems simple, but the answer to it requires distinctions. due to the fact that each of the 3 races is imposed in a different mode, by another mechanisms.

Competency race. It is in this race that the rhetoric “AI imposes the pace” is most misleading. An office individual sitting in front of a screen is not under force from a language model. The language model does not force anyone to do anything, it does not fire anyone. It is under force from a peculiar employer who, in the language model, sees a way of reducing employment, costs or task implementation time. This is simply a very circumstantial relation of power – between capital and work – in which "AI" serves as a comfortable veil.

Let's look at it directly. erstwhile we tell an worker “you gotta learn constantly due to the fact that AI” – we do 3 things at once. First of all, we blur responsibility: alternatively of calling a circumstantial business decision (automation of activities, simplification of employment in certain teams), we mention to impersonal force. Secondly, we acquit decision-makers: since they are ‘AIs’, no 1 in peculiar is responsible. Thirdly, we shift the cost of the strategy change per unit: the individual is to adapt, although it does not affect the decisions affecting him.

To put it another way: "Let's run faster, due to the fact that AI" is simply a convenient run utilized by those who gain on this run. Investors awaiting productivity growth 4th to quarter, tech giants, for whom the pace of implementation is simply a business model, consultants for whom the fear of remaining behind this origin of earnings – they all have an interest in making the communicative sound as it sounds. It's not a conspiracy, it's just a mechanics reflecting the interests of these groups. If the public debate takes over this slogan without reflection, it serves as a servant to these interests.

Doesn't mean it's not worth studying. It only means that the question "how to run faster" is simply a substitute question. The right question is, who sets the pace? At whose expense? What kind of institutions could negociate this pace? Where are the trade unions in the AI talk today? Where are public policies that treat the transformation of work as a collective problem alternatively than an individual duty? These questions are insufficiently present in the Polish and European public debate.

Race for judgment. This race is simply a hybrid. It has an individual and collective dimension, and each 1 is governed by a different logic. The individual dimension – the question of what to do with this tool in my own life, work, work – has a individual dimension. Nobody's imposing anything here. Here you gotta sit with yourself and consider internally: what I care about, what questions to ask, where to look for the value to go with everything that AI makes available to me. These are the questions that each of us should ask ourselves, and no 1 can aid us.

But the race for judgement besides has a collective dimension – and here the issue looks completely different. Questions about which way technology itself develops, what its applications are supported, what are limited, what values are built into it – these are purely political questions. Here, the expression “AI requires us to justice better” proves to be a hoax. And he doesn't want anything from us. We should have the right to decide its direction, but we do not have that right today, due to the fact that it has been concentrated in the hands of a very narrow group of actors: respective American and Chinese companies, a group of investors and politicians of 2 countries.

Europe, and even more so Poland, is virtually absent in this decision-making structure. This is not about deficiency of method competence – although it is besides real. It's something deeper: a deficiency of institutions. Today, we have no serious space – neither national nor European – in which we would collectively decide what we would like to usage this technology and what we would like to avoid. The regulations that arise (like the EU AI Act) are naturally reactive – they find what is forbidden and not worth doing. AI strategies and policies and ethical committees are very frequently simply facades – they produce papers that change little. Similarly, the alleged public consultation.

As a result, we adopt AI like the weather: it happens, you gotta adapt. But technologies are not weather – they are constructed. And erstwhile 1 side constructs and the another 1 adapts, it's not neutral dynamics. This is the relation of power in which any set the conditions of life for others. The deficiency of collective judgement does not mean that there are no judgments. It only means that they are issued elsewhere – in boardrooms of three-four companies, in laboratories of respective investigation centres, in strategies of 2 countries. And we get ready solutions to implement, wrapped in the rhetoric of inevitability.

Race for identity.This race is the hardest to capture – due to the fact that it is the deepest. The first 2 inactive know who the subject is: an worker to adapt; a citizen to decide. In this 3rd entity, it is besides subject to change. It's not about what we choose anymore – it's about what's left of us, erstwhile the choice was made, in the background.

And that's why this race is the most dangerous. Not due to the fact that there is no address to send a protest, nor a company to boycott – although it is true. The most dangerous is that erstwhile the criteria themselves change, the ability to admit that we are losing something disappears. The failure does not look like a failure – it looks like progress.

Actors of course are: interface designers, for whom each of the facilitated clicks is simply a success; companies for which our getting utilized to it is simply a business model; the full economy of attention that has been preparing the ground for 2 decades at this point. But unlike the first race, where an indication of actors is adequate to call the problem – here the indication of actors is only the beginning. due to the fact that even if they disappeared, the change in us and in culture already has its own dynamics.

AI does not impose on us the pace or direction of change – it is done by circumstantial actors, interests and institutions that usage technology to form economic, social and political relations. The top hazard is to accept these processes as inevitable, due to the fact that then we lose the ability to decide not only how we usage AI, but besides who we become influenced by them.

Renegotiation of forces

Looking from a distance, you can see in these 3 races that the AI is present utilized to redefine key power systems in the modern world: between work and capital; between a citizen and power; between states and large technological corporations; between customers and companies that usage AI to profile and segment; between man and technology itself, etc.

This is not a bad thing – all breakthrough technology in past was an chance for specified renegotiation. The printing renegotiated the relation between the Church and the faithful. Electricity – between erstwhile we admit that the day ends and the night begins. net – between the writer and the reader. This time, however, the stakes are highly high, due to the fact that AI touches many layers simultaneously: economic, political, cultural and existential.

AI becomes a tool for renegotiating the most crucial agreements of forces – between work and capital, citizen and power, state and technological corporations and yet man and technology. These relationships will surely change – but will we co-decision on their fresh form or just passively adapt?

And the renegotiation that goes on present has 1 disturbing feature: it takes place mainly on 1 side of the table. Workers don't negociate due to the fact that they don't have representation. Citizens don't negociate due to the fact that they don't have institutions. European countries do not negociate due to the fact that they have no cause. And individuals don't negociate due to the fact that they frequently haven't even noticed that negotiations have begun.

So the question is not "will AI change the arrangement of forces" – due to the fact that it will. It's like, whether we're going to be a page or just a subject.

What do I do about it?

If each of the 3 races is imposed differently, then each 1 requires a different answer. 1 expression – whether “Learn faster” or “release and think” or “Let’s regulate AI” – is not adequate for all. We request 3 different strategies, tailored to the nature of each race.

Competency race. This race requires a political consequence in the classical sense of the word. Not individual mobilisation, but the restoration of collective capacity to negociate the pace and conditions of the transition of work. These are old questions about the relations of capital and labour – only in a fresh robe. And like any old question, it's not gonna go distant from the fact that we don't tell them. What precisely would gotta change?

Firstly, the issue of the function of trade unions in the cognition economy must return to public discussion. In countries specified as Germany and the Nordic countries, unions participate in setting the conditions for the implementation of fresh technologies, participate in decisions on automation, have a real impact on how transformation is spread over time and who it concerns. In Poland, unions barely function in sectors where AI hits most – intellectual services, IT, media. Without the organization representation of workers in these sectors, their destiny is entirely in the hands of employers.

Secondly, we request public policies that treat labour transformation as a collective problem. It is not about blocking change, but about spreading it over time and socialising its costs. Retraining programmes financed publicly. Experimenting with shortening the working week as a form of distribution of productivity growth effects. Similarly, the basic income on a limited scale. Renegotiation of the relation between employment, platform work and self-employment. All these are topics that should have been on the agenda a long time ago, but almost not at all.

Thirdly, you gotta break up with rhetoric, which all work for the adaptation of AI is put into the unit. "Everybody must learn constantly" is simply a kind of elegant cruelty in the current context. Promises individual solution to a problem that is collective, and charges the unit at the expense of a change that is not affected. We request a modern support strategy for continuous learning. A 60-year-old accountant, a cashier at the supermarket, a local paper editor – they all hear that they are to “keep up”. Most of them will not keep up, not for deficiency of will, but for structural reasons.

Race for judgment. The second race requires an organization response. Not in a regulatory sense (although and regulation is needed), but in a sense of rebuilding places where we collectively decide the directions of technological development.

The concept that may be worth introducing to the Polish public debate is technological democracy. It is not about a referendum on all algorithm, but about the rule that decisions on how technology shapes collective life should be made in a democratic manner – involving civic representation, not just in a narrow group of experts, investors and officials.

In practice, this means the request to make fresh organization solutions that would enable a wide scope of citizens to be active in the search for answers to questions: “how do we want AI to be utilized in the Polish school?”, “what do we want to regulate in the area of AI and healthcare?”, “what applications of AI in public administration do we accept and what do we not?”. In Poland we have experience with civilian panels, so there is something to build on.

A fresh kind of civilian society engagement in AI is besides needed. Today, NGOs dealing with AI are mainly a narrow digital rights group – and they do it well, but it is besides narrow. There is simply a deficiency of organisations that combine method competence with questions about quality of work, intellectual welfare, education, art, democracy. Each of these fields should have its competent spokespersons on AI matters, not related to technology companies.

And this is the most crucial thing for us – Europe must find its role. Not in a computational race that will not be won structurally (capital scale, energy access, talent concentration on the American and Chinese side), but in being a place where AI is better conceived – deeper embedded in social institutions, better integrated with pluralism of value, tested for questions wider than quarterly productivity. This requires both regulation (and AI Act is the first step here) and a affirmative imagination – what we want from AI, not just what we fear.

Poland has an chance to play an crucial function in this European task – as a country with surviving intermediary institutions, an unfinished social tradition of the marketplace economy, a experience of systemic transformation, which teaches to think of institutions as something that is being built and not replaced. But it requires something that is missing today: a conscious decision that we want to be an active player. That we do not agree to be just a marketplace and a "data colony" for solutions designed elsewhere.

Race for identity. This race requires an answer that cannot be organised from a political level. due to the fact that the problem is not political. It is whether we can – separately and collectively – keep something within ourselves that technology will not replace.

Each of the 3 races created by the improvement of AI requires a different response: political consequence to changes in work, organization consequence to technological and cultural and individual directions to changes in the identity dimension. The common goal of these strategies should be to recover the origin – so that AI is not just a force to which we adapt, but a technology that we can consciously co-ordinate.

On an individual level, the substance concerns basic intellectual hygiene. Ability to silence. Take your time thinking. Writing without an assistant. Reading without summary. No real-time search. A walk without a podcast. These are things that humanity has practiced for millennia, and which today, in the age of constant availability of AI, require a conscious decision.

This is not about asceticism or technophobia. It's about maintaining the ability to lose by neglect. These changes happen slow and are mostly reversible – but only if you announcement them.

Individual hygiene, however, is not enough, due to the fact that the field of defence at the level of culture is more difficult. Over 3 decades ago Neil Postman described this level in Technopoly: a state in which technology ceases to be a tool and becomes an authority defining what we consider reasonable at all. What cannot be measured, automated, stored in data – ceases to exist. Postman then warned that freedom in specified a culture was not taken by force; it was dissolved in comfort. AI is the culmination of this dynamics today, not its source.

The question is: what cultures are resistant to subjectivity erosion and what are susceptible to subjectivity? societies that have strong contemplative traditions, rich community life, surviving institutions of the family, religion, and art – have something they can base on. societies in which these institutions are weakened may lose their presence faster than expected.

This points attention to the unobvious. Cultural policy, humanist education, support for local communities, a space for religion in a public conversation (no substance how each of us thinks about it privately), the value of free time not interrupted by screens – all in this position are not only cultural but even strategical issues. due to the fact that without them even the best AI regulation will be an effort to halt the river with your bare hands.

Entityity as rate

All 3 answers – political, institutional, existential-cultural – have a common root. Each is, in its own mode, an exercise of subjectivity.

The first is the recovery of labour and civic participation in the economical sphere. The second is to rebuild collective entity in the area of deciding on the directions of technological development. 3rd – cultivating individual subjectivity in an intimate dimension of everyday life, reasoning and language.

All 3 are needed. no of them are enough. But their common denominator is important: each of them is based on an presumption that is not apparent present – that we are the entities, not just the objects of the process that includes us.

We must remember that subjectivity is not given to us erstwhile and for all. You can lose her. And most importantly, it can be lost not only by violence, but besides by comfort. Not only due to the fact that someone's taking something from us, but besides due to the fact that we're giving something back ourselves, not knowing when. This is what happens in the following areas "taken over" by AI. No one's taking distant our subjectivity. We give it back – in grammar, in priorities, in the way we organize ourselves a day, in microcurrency, which impose on each another for weeks and months they change ourselves.

Therefore, the first step is neither regulation nor technology nor politics. It's just not being able to see. Noting who is the subject of the sentences we describe the world. To see who gains from specified a communicative alternatively than another narrative. announcement erstwhile we say "AI requires", although we could say more precisely. Noting erstwhile we're posting a device something that we actually want to keep to ourselves.

The real stake of the AI era is subjectivity – the ability to keep performance in the sphere of work, public life and regular choices. We can lose it not only by coercion, but besides by the convenience and without reflection of technology decisions. It is crucial to participate consciously in the change, alternatively of giving in passively to it.

A tiny question, put adequate times – who? – has the strength that no technology has. due to the fact that he forces people – ourselves and others – to take work for decisions that like to hide behind the impersonal language of progress. This is not a philosophical question. It is the basic tool of civic self-defense in an era in which technology has become the main alibi of power.

We inactive have the subjectivity. Let us not let ourselves to be deprived of it voluntarily and let us not quit on it ourselves. In front of our eyes, the systems of forces in which our children and grandchildren will live for decades to come – between work and capital, between a citizen and power, between man and technology, etc. This renegotiation can't be stopped. However, it can be decided whether we participate in it as a organization or whether we are its object. And subjectivity is simply a circumstantial value – erstwhile we give it back, it will be hard to recover.