In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen. Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a far graver significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far graver than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that. According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent […]