This is the working title of my current book manuscript. I am about 40K words in, so 40%? The concept of empire has already been interwoven into the emerging field of critical AI studies, which (in my view) is bringing together DH, critical code studies, critical data studies, digital rhetoric, media studies, cultural studies of science and technology, and so on. Clearly the issue of empire arises from postcolonial, decolonial, indigenous studies and related fields. Hardt and Negri also come to mind here. Empire also has an existing place in these works like Benjamin Bratton’s where other concepts of empire, that connect abstractly and diagrammatically with Deleuzian concepts of control come into play.

Here is what I am doing so far. This is a “book proposal” just a summary of the current material. The other 1/2 – 2/3 will… well, more on that later.

I’d love to know what you think and what I am missing. I am only posthuman.

This text explores artificial intelligence through the intertwined lenses of philosophy, neuroscience, and media archaeology. Beginning with Borges’ detective Lönnrot, who follows reason’s straight line into a fatal hallucination, it raises the question of whether AGI might be caught in similar predictive traps. Human cognition, understood in neuroscience as a “controlled hallucination,” offers a parallel: the mind constantly predicts and corrects sensory input to reduce surprise. AI, too, operates through predictive logics—what matters are the consequences of hallucinations enacted at scale.

The neuroscientific framework of active inference and Karl Friston’s free energy principle grounds this discussion. Drawing on Shannon’s information theory, Friston explains cognition as minimizing prediction error to conserve energy. Anil Seth’s notion of reality as a managed hallucination underscores the constructed nature of experience. This connects modern science with philosophical traditions from Plato to Bergson and Deleuze, where temporality and emergence define intelligence.

Time is central here. Deleuze distinguishes Chronos—quantifiable, linear time—from Aion—subjective, intensive time. Predictive minds oscillate between boredom, anxiety, and absorption, each altering our felt temporality. AI likewise operates not only in computational chronology but also in rhythms that structure human life: recommendation feeds, navigation systems, and algorithmic schedules. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) literalize this convergence, using EEG, fNIRS, and neurofeedback to modulate attention, mood, and perception. These technologies suggest that AI can entrain human cognition, reorganizing temporal experience itself.

Media archaeology expands the frame. Technologies are inherently time-critical, from celestial rhythms that once governed calendars to algorithmic infrastructures that now structure daily life. Today, AI is embedded in planetary computation: devices synchronized through Coordinated Universal Time link human activity to nonhuman, global temporalities. This situates users within operational scales that exceed perception, producing new rhythms and subject positions.

A key conceptual shift reframes “artificial intelligence” as “intelligent artifacts.” Rather than opposing natural and artificial, intelligence is seen as an ongoing material and cultural process. From clay tablets and metallurgy to fiber optics and neural nets, cognition emerges through artifacts that record, transmit, and process signals. Following Simondon, phylogenesis (historical development) and ontogenesis (individuating processes) together describe AI as both deeply historical and continually becoming. Assemblage theory provides the hinge: predictive minds and technical systems are collective enunciations stabilized through rhythms, symbols, and affects.

This emphasis on rhythm leads to entrainment—the synchronization of bodies, media, and affects across scales, from conversation turn-taking to religious ritual. Predictive minds are always reterritorialized through such rhythmic, symbolic processes. Incorporeal transformations, like declaring someone guilty or becoming angry, illustrate how events emerge simultaneously as lived intensities and institutional codings. AI, in this frame, becomes another agent in producing such transformations.

Finally, the ecological and geological stakes are underscored. AI is inseparable from its material substrates: metals, minerals, and infrastructures that leave irreversible traces in the Anthropocene. Jussi Parikka’s geology of media and Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy reveal that intelligence is already mineralized. The Earth itself, as Bratton notes, participates in planetary computation through satellites, networks, and global chronometers. AGI, therefore, cannot be imagined apart from planetary materialities—it is co-constituted with the strata of the Earth. Here, empire orients the process by which algorithmic governance generates planetary rule (state space).

In sum, AI is best understood not as a discrete invention but as a population of intelligent artifacts: predictive, hallucinatory, ecological, and entangled with human cognition and planetary infrastructures. By reframing intelligence in terms of temporality and material genealogy, the text advances a posthuman account of AI that highlights its deep entanglement with ecological and geological processes.

n.b., you can see the WordPress ai gen image for this post. Here’s what ChatGPT-5 came up with, so there may be hope for us yet. That says, it does get the point across.