Superintelligence (AI) as ‘Product’: Rethinking the ‘Political’ and Human Existence

The study of the history of economic development has significantly evolved from Hegel and Marx to Post- Latourian and Hararian framework- a shift from ‘ownership as subject’ and ‘product as object’ (Hegel 1991, pp. 41-46), to product itself having some kind of agency in Latourian sense (Latour 2005, pp. 63–86) and to technology as not neutral object/instrument but capable of restructuring human relations (Heidegger 1977) and alongside Harari’s proposition that AI can be seen not merely as a ‘tool’ but an ‘agent’ (Harari 2024 p. xxii). These frameworks provide substantial insights while raising new questions about AI as well as political and ethical concepts.
Against this backdrop, this panel seeks to move beyond above theoretical frameworks to examine how AI is not merely a conventional product for human consumption. It considers that AI possesses potentially transformative capacities that transcend the analytical scope of Liberal and Marxist frameworks. In particular, it explores how the centrality of AI as ‘product’ may restructure the existing capitalist (super)structure itself by assuming simultaneous multiple consequential roles in relation to human existence and related concepts.
This panel invites submissions from different disciplines examining the distinctive dimensions of AI as product, and how they expose distinct governing mechanisms concerning AI innovation and its market. Contributors are encouraged to explore how AI as a product may cease to remain merely a product and instead reshape our understanding of the ‘political’, the meaning of human existence, and transform economic and social relations among humans and AI agents.