Abstract

The paradigms of Organism, Machine, and Language draw a combined genealogy that influenced the evolution of information technologies, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence since the early 20th century. These three paradigms, often implicitly deployed as paradigms of the social constitution, played an important role also in the transformation of philosophy, anthropology, and political economy (in a similar way, Michel Foucault famously suggested that the three epistemes of modernity are Life, Labour, and Language). The belief that a Machine could be designed as an Organism gave rise to cybernetics. Similarly, the digital computer could be presented as the first paradigmatic synthesis of Language and Machine (which inspired also Jacques Lacan’s first sketch of the machinic unconscious following Claude Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology). One could read an artificial neural network as a self-organising computing machine, which is today the core structure of Large Language Models. In current AI models, and in the belief that they are »alive« and »sentient«, we can discern the confluence of Organism, Machine, and Language as sociotechnical paradigms.