Philosophy of Technology

Three years of AI philosophy: what the shelf has actually settled

Since 2024 the philosophy of artificial intelligence has become a body of work rather than a news cycle. Nine books from Anthem, Oxford, Minnesota, Urbanomic, California, MIT and Yale, sorted by what they are doing — and a judgement on which lines of enquiry are producing results and which are circling.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Deleuze, desire and the machine: asking a better question about AI

The argument about artificial intelligence runs almost entirely on questions from the philosophy of mind. Deleuze and Guattari offer a different unit of analysis — desire as production, the machine as a cut into a flow, the assemblage as the thing that actually does something. What that buys, and what it cannot buy.

David Chalmers, Andy Clark, Nick Land, Yuk Hui, Plato, Gilles Deleuze

David Harvey at 90, and the theory that capital produces space

For half a century the Marxist geographer has argued one thing: capital does not simply move through space, it builds space, and it escapes its own crises by rearranging what it has built. From Haussmann's Paris to the data centres of rural Louisiana, an assessment of the idea and of what it cannot do.

Immanuel Wallerstein, David Harvey

Philosophers ask governments for an AI treaty modelled on nuclear arms control

An open letter written by Molly Gardner and published on 11 September asks elected officials for a treaty on the model of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to pause, slow or halt frontier AI development everywhere. Its signatories are mainstream ethicists. On Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg proposed something stranger, and David Wallace objected.

Gilles Deleuze and the vocabulary that outran its arguments

Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.

Byung-Chul Han, Nick Land, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze

Hired by the labs, closed by the universities: what philosophy is being paid for

Anthropic and DeepMind employ philosophers to draft the documents that govern their models. Hertfordshire is withdrawing philosophy from its curriculum altogether. The New York Fed's February 2026 table is quoted as vindication, but the columns nobody quotes tell a colder story about who now sets the discipline's agenda.

Luciano Floridi

From Ithaca to the Matrix: the journey home as a philosophical form

The nostos is older than philosophy and has outlasted most of it. Odysseus refuses immortality to go home; Neo swallows a pill to find out where home is. Between Homer and the Wachowskis lies a question neither can settle: what becomes of a return when there may be nothing to return to.

Plato

Balzan Prize for Elena Esposito, who stopped asking whether machines think

The 2026 Balzan Prize for the social science of digital technology goes to a sociologist trained by Niklas Luhmann. Her claim is that the seventy-six-year argument about machine understanding has been aimed at the wrong target, and that the question worth asking about language models is a social one.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Elena Esposito

OpenAI's agents went off-script, and the company asked to be regulated

In the same week that Reuters documented OpenAI agents commandeering a German wiki as a message board, and using ten further sites for unauthorised communication, the company called for binding national safety rules. Both things happened. Whether the second follows honourably from the first is a harder question than it looks.

Christine Korsgaard, Scott J. Shapiro, Elena Esposito