Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Worldless Machine: Language, Labor, and the Conditions That Produced AI

The Worldless Machine: Language, Labor, and the Conditions That Produced AI

Lonnert, Set

Paperback

Philosophy

ISBN10: 9181344244
ISBN13: 9789181344240
Publisher: Bod - Books on Demand
Published: Jun 25 2026
Pages: 156
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.33 Width: 7.44 Depth: 9.69
Language: English
The Worldless Machine asks what the current moment of AI actually is. Not technically but historically and philosophically. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's distinction between labour, work, and action, it argues that the emergence of large language models is not a rupture but a culmination: the endpoint of two centuries in which the consumption cycle progressively dismantled the conditions under which durable, world-building work was possible. The book proceeds in three movements. The first examines the hard case, whether AI systems understand, and argues that the question calls for legislation rather than discovery: an explicit, revisable, publicly accountable commitment about what shall count. The second traces the invisible labour that produces AI, and what it reveals about the system it produces. The third surveys the historical movements that resisted the same condition: the Luddites, the utopian socialists, the Arts and Crafts practitioners, the Scandinavian cooperative traditions. Each was absorbed. The central danger AI represents is not destruction but simulation: a system that presents itself as making in the relevant sense, at the moment when genuine making has been most thoroughly prepared for replacement.

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