Etiqueta: ai

Outonomy book is out!

Xabier BarandiaranDeja un comentario

I am very happy to announce the publication of Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual, edited by Arantza Etxeberria and me. This book is the unified and integrated result of our the research project of the same title lead by myself and Leonardo Bich that finished over a year ago. The book gathers a rich, cross-disciplinary exploration of autonomy that moves beyond the classic, self-sufficient, abstract, rational and detached model of the individual we inherited from modernity. Instead, it develops the concept of outonomy to capture how autonomy is constituted through relations: with environments, other agents, technologies, institutions, and social-ecological systems.

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Why “Outonomy”?

Autonomy has long been central to modern thought, ethics, and the life sciences. But many contemporary debates across philosophy of biology, cognitive science, medicine, technology studies, and political theory show that the boundaries and concerns of the individual more far beyond itself. The outonomy framework responds to this situation by offering a more interactional and environmentally situated account of self-governance and normativity.

In the opening chapter, Barandiaran and Etxeberria outline 4 key properties that help articulate this shift:

  • Interactivity
  • Collectivity
  • Extensionality
  • Environmentality

Along two fundamental dimensions:

  • Integration
  • Sustainability

Together, these ideas reframe autonomy as something that emerges across scales of interaction and dependence, rather than something sealed within an isolated individual.

A structured journey across life, mind, technology, and politics

The volume is organized into four parts that build a coherent arc while engaging multiple domains:

Part I: Theoretical Insights
Foundational chapters clarify the conceptual stakes of outonomy and rethink control and organization in biological systems.

Part II: The Fabric of Life
Chapters address environments and asymmetries, the origins of life, reproduction, and a compelling application to menstrual health.

Part III: The Psychic Self and Its Environment
Here the outonomy perspective extends into psychiatry, salutogenesis, and pain, emphasizing embodied and relational normativity.

Part IV: Technology, Ecology & Politics
These chapters explore technocomplexity, the limits of autonomy in social-ecological systems, subjects-in-common, and mindshaping in relation to adaptive preferences.

Co-authored chapters

I have co-edited the book, and co-authores three chapters:

  • Barandiaran, X. E., & Etxeberria, A. (2026). Outonomy, the Very Idea. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 3–12). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_1
    • Here we introduce the concept of Outonomy as an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of the concept of autonomy as inherited from modernity.
  • Cabello, V., Merlo, A., Mancilla, M., Siqueiros, J. M., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2026). Autonomy and Its Limits in Social-Ecological Systems. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 121–130). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_12
    • In this chapter, we approach the notion of autonomy at its largest planetary scale. Social-ecological systems are in need of a deep exercise of autonomy as self-limitation and care if we are to avoid the increasing destruction of living diversity and flourishing life on earth.
  • Calleja-López, A., Pérez-Verdugo, M., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2026). Autonomy and Technology: From Instrumentalism to Technocomplexity. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 111–120). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_11
    • This chapter captures the dialectical moments that tie autonomy and technology, from the naïve, yet widespread, instrumental use to the techno-complex participatory constitution of our extended life, passing through the persistent thread of an increasingly autonomous techno-economic system that subsumes and alienates human autonomy.

A collaborative research effort

The book emerges from sustained work within the Outonomy research network and related projects, with authors actively reviewing and strengthening each other’s contributions. It also benefits from external reviewers who helped refine the final manuscript.

Download and read the book or some of its chapters:
Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual

Generative Midtentionality: How AI could change intentionality

Xabier Barandiaran1 comentario

Barandiaran, X. E., & Pérez-Verdugo, M. (2025). Generative midtended cognition and Artificial Intelligence: Thinging with thinging things. Synthese, 205(4), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-04961-4

Previous preprint available:

I really do think with my pen, because my head
often knows nothing about what my hand is writing
WITTGENSTEIN

I’m excited to share a recent publication co-authored with Marta Pérez-Verdugo titled Generative Midtended Cognition and Artificial Intelligence: Thinging with Thinging Things. This paper represents an initial step in our broader exploration of how generative AI transforms human cognitive agency in ways that traditional frameworks of extended cognition fall short of capturing.

Did you ever experience the situation in which a human provided you with the word you were struggling to find out, accepted the suggestion, made it your own, and kept talking? Well, it happens that generative AI technologies are expanding this phenomenon to unprecedented levels. In this paper we start thinking about the consequences. To do so our work introduces the novel concept of «generative midtended cognition.» This term describes a hybrid cognitive process where generative AI becomes part of human creative agency, enabling interactions that sit between intention and extension: thus midtention. With AI’s ability to iteratively generate complex outputs, «midtended» cognition reflects the creative process where humans and AI co-generate a product, shaping the outcome together (see figure below). We explicitly define midtended cognition as follows:

Given a cognitive agent X, a generative system Y (artificial or otherwise) and cognitive product Z, midtension takes place when generative interventions produced by Y become constitutive of the intentional generation of Z by X, whereby X keeps some sense of agency or authorship over Z.

For those interested in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, or the implications of generative AI, this paper offers a theoretical basis to understand the cognitive depth of these human-AI interactions. Beyond classical extended, enactive and material cognition approaches, we suggest that generative AI initiates a form of cognition closer to social interactions than classical extended cognition approaches to technology. Yet, interacting with a generative AI is not itself a social interaction stricto sensu. It is something new. In order to get a better grasp on this novelty, we introduce and analyse two dimensions of “width” (sensitivity to context) and “depth” (granularity of interaction).

Given the unique generative power of these technologies and the hybrid forms of human-environment interactions they make possible, it’s essential to address both the promising potential and the ethical challenges they introduce. The paper explores multiple scenarios, from authenticity risks to the spectre of cognitive atrophy. But perhaps, it points out to a new concept we find particularly revealing and worth a follow-up paper to develop in depth: that of the economy of intention. We have previously analysed the concept of the economy of attention, an economic driver of contemporary social order and disorders. The phenomenon of Midtended Cognition might well move cognitive capitalism a step forward into a deeper commodification of the mind: not only the information that captures our attention, but the very intentional plans, creations, and projects we make «our own» might now be vulnerable to corporate injection.

ABSTRACT: This paper introduces the concept of  “generative midtended cognition”, that explores the integration of generative AI technologies with human cognitive processes. The term «generative» reflects AI’s ability to iteratively produce structured outputs, while «midtended» captures the potential hybrid (human-AI) nature of the process. It stands between traditional conceptions of intended creation, understood as steered or directed from within, and extended processes that bring exo-biological processes into the creative process. We examine the working of current generative technologies (based on multimodal transformer architectures typical of large language models like ChatGPT), to explain how they can transform human cognitive agency beyond what the conceptual resources of standard theories of extended cognition can capture. We suggest that the type of cognitive activity typical of the coupling between a human and generative technologies is closer (but not equivalent) to social cognition than to classical extended cognitive paradigms. Yet, it deserves a specific treatment. We provide an explicit definition of generative midtended cognition in which we treat interventions by AI systems as constitutive of the agent’s intentional creative processes. Furthermore, we distinguish two dimensions of generative hybrid creativity: 1. Width: captures the sensitivity of the context of the generative process (from the single letter to the whole historical and surrounding data), 2. Depth: captures the granularity of iteration loops involved in the process. Generative midtended cognition stands in the middle depth between conversational forms of cognition in which complete utterances or creative units are exchanged, and micro-cognitive (e.g. neural) subpersonal processes. Finally, the paper discusses the potential risks and benefits of widespread generative AI adoption, including the challenges of authenticity, generative power asymmetry, and creative boost or atrophy.

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Media interventions around AI: collective intelligence, undead gods, and democratization

Xabier BarandiaranDeja un comentario
DALL-E 3 generated image of a group of people confronting the future of AI in nature
Human collective intelligence facing an AI mediated future.
[Image generated with DALL-E 3]

My life has come close to AI in different moments. I wrote my first AI program in 1999 (in Prolog), my first neural network in 2001. But I have mostly remained as an AI sceptic, more devoted to explore how Artificial Life models can partially disclose some of the intricate mysteries of life (biological, psychological, and social) than to the possibility of computer programs achieving anything close to human-level linguistic competence. I started to feel that something was changing in AI research when DeepMind first claimed to have succeeded in playing Go and, more importantly, in playing different computer games, using human controls (e.g. first-person visuomotor feedback), and without knowing or encoding the game rules in advance (Schrittwieser et al. 2020).

Philosophy has spent the last couple of centuries announcing the death of God, it is now time to remember that AI is not alive.

I could smell something was about to change quickly. Other indicators were already clearly visible (big tech buying small AI firms, among others). So, when I read that a company called OpenAI was accepting requests to use their GPT3 API, I rapidly signed for early access. I got hands onto GPT the 26th February 2021. I spent almost three days in a row hooked to my computer. I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing. Despite the lack of fine-tuning, the numerous hallucinations, the confusing interface (I had to discover what “prompting” meant for myself), … the experience was absolutely overwhelming. On my understanding of what computer could do, they simply were not supposed to do that 🙂

AI-driven corporation are already the new Gods, showing themselves as living on the clouds, as omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent, mysteriously incomprehensible, and biased, like any other God before

Parallel to my research on philosophy of mind and cognitive science, I have been a tech activist for a couple of decades. I could feel that what I just witnessed, talking to a computer program that wasn’t playing the silly psychoanalytic trick, was about to “change everything”. Two years latter I am still not surprised, although I start to be tired, of hearing it. And they are good reasons for it.

AI is really a compressed form of digitized and automatized Collective Intelligence

It is still difficult to stop thinking on the philosophical, political and, at large, social consequences of the changes to come (none of which, by the way, should make us forget that caring for human lives, and for life on earth must, be the absolute priority for everyone, that there is no AI that is going to save us).

During these couple of years I have been asked to participate in different talks, interviews, round-panels, etc. And 2023 was particularly active. Collected here, you can find a number of media interventions in English, Spanish and Basque, where I elaborate on different aspects of the ongoing AI «revolution». In these interventions, I have aimed to explore the ethical, societal, and technological dimensions of AI, reaching out to diverse audiences. But they all touch upon 3 main ideas:

  1. If not all, at least the most recently successful AI, is really a compressed form of digitized and automatized Collective Intelligence, that is the structured result of large scale human cognitive live sedimented in the huge mathematical apparatus sustaining AI, on the gigantic corpus of textual and visual data used during training and the huge amounts of cognitive and emotional labour put on reinforcement learning and curating the data.
  2. The transformations to come are so deep that, in order to understand and cope with it, we might only rely on socio-cultural resources coming from religious studies and the transformations that the invention of writing brought to human life. AI-driven corporation are already the new Gods, showing themselves as living on the clouds, as omniscient, omnipotent, transcendent, mysteriously incomprehensible, and biased, like any other God before. Philosophy has spent the last couple of centuries announcing the death of God, it is now time to remember that AI is not alive. And yet, for years to come, we might not be able to live without AI. In a sense, they are the new undead Gods.
  3. We are the life of AI, and the complexity and power of these new technologies cannot rest on the hands of private corporate industries. Democratizing AI is an urgent task. It already belongs to us, we need to reclaim it back. Beyond regulation, political action need to take innovative agency. It is not about acceleration or deceleration, it is about steering our futures.

1. Interventions in English

2. Interventions in Spanish

3. Interventions in Basque