About this episode
Simon and Dr. Jack Black discuss AI through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, exploring its implications on desire, power, and education.
Show Notes In this episode Simon and Dr. Jack Black, Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, think dangerously about AI through the unsettling lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is a conversation about desire, discourse, power and the fantasies we project onto machines. Drawing on Lacan, Jack reframes AI not as a neutral tool or intelligent object, but as a relational phenomenon - one that speaks into us, structures us, and increasingly stands in for authority itself. Together, Simon and Jack interrogate how AI comes to occupy the place of the Big Other: the supposed holder of knowledge, truth, and certainty in a fragmented world. They explore Lacan’s four discourses, particularly the discourse of the hysteric, as a way of resisting AI’s creeping authority and the ideological narratives that present it as omniscient, objective, or inevitable. AI, they argue, does not know in any human sense - it recombines, repeats, and reflects back our own symbolic order, including its exclusions, biases and violences. The conversation moves into education, where AI is rapidly being positioned as a new master signifier. What happens when learning is outsourced to algorithmic…
People in this episode
Host: Simon
Guest: Dr Jack Black
Topics covered
- AI
- Lacanian psychoanalysis
- desire
- discourse
- power
- education
Keywords
- Big Other
- hysteric discourse
- cultural anxiety
- algorithmic systems
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: The Psychosis of Race: A Lacanian Approach to Racism and Racialization, Sport and Psychoanalysis: What Sport Reveals about Our Unconscious Desires, Fantasies, and Fears
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