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Your GPS corrects you before you go wrong. The spellchecker polishes your sentences. The coding assistant guesses your intentions. Everything becomes easier, faster, smoother. But in this slide towards total comfort, something invisible is happening: little by little, we stop thinking for ourselves.
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler had a word for it: the proletarianisation of knowledge. Where the worker once lost his skill to the machine, we are now losing our ability to reflect, decide and create. First, factories dispossessed the hand. Then the culture industries standardised our ways of life. Now artificial intelligence is proletarianising thought itself.
This did not happen overnight. It unfolded in three waves:
The hand: the craftsman becomes a proletarian, the gesture is emptied of its intelligence
Life: the consumer absorbs symbols he no longer creates
Thought: the designer delegates his judgement to the machine
Today, with generative AI, we are crossing a new threshold. Thinking becomes a paid service. Creativity, a premium option. And surveillance capitalism, which already captures our data and predicts our behaviour, is getting ready to monetise even our ideas.
But nothing is inevitable. Stiegler preached neither the rejection of technology nor nostalgia for the past. He invited us to understand that technology is a pharmakon: both poison and cure. It all depends on how we inhabit it.
So what can we do? Take back control of our attention. Steer our tools towards contribution rather than consumption. Make technology an extension of human intelligence, not its substitute. The choice does not belong to the machines. It depends on the care we take of our own thinking.
This is Prometheus’s fire: no longer the stolen flame, but the light preserved.
Find the full transcript of this episode, along with all the sources and plenty more, at: Think as a Service or the proletarianization of knowledge