A New Navigation Paradigm (and more Pharmakon)

This essay is a must-read for anyone thinking about AI. Read it twice. Head to the Discord to discuss with your fellow meatballs if you wish.

“To navigate is to read the world in order to move through it, whether it means scanning a crowd to find a familiar face, deciphering the logic of a bookstore’s layout, or following the stars at sea. This ability has always been mediated by tools (many of them disruptive and transformative). Still, the rise of artificial intelligence presents us with a radical promise: a world where we no longer need maps, because the information or the product “comes to us.”

“Faced with this transformation, this essay begins with a central question: Is AI truly eliminating navigation, or is it simply shifting its agent and its form?”

“My central argument is that AI (or more precisely, AI as a product, rather than a pure technology) does not eliminate navigation. Instead, navigation is delegated to a systemic agent that operates invisibly. From this starting point, I want to reflect on how such delegation may impact our navigational abilities. In some cases, generate a kind of cognitive debt by depriving us of a formative practice.”

“Finally, I want to leave you, the reader, with a provocation: perhaps this transformation demands more than just an individual adaptation, maybe it requires rethinking more systemically how we engage with these new tools of agency.”