Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and characterise our own cognitive and cultural or commercially and institutionally-cultivated selves with sufficient sophistication to ever successfully navigate this Gordian Knot. We have always been extended by, through and as information systems that inhabit us just as much as we inhabit them.
Daedelus Kite 