[Paper Review] Humanity Is Beginning to Resemble Chatbots

Jeong Hye-wook's paper The Advent of Singularity and Precarious Life: AI, the Unconscious, and the Subject of the Gap (2025) analyzes how AI is restructuring the structure of human thought, language, and desire, and how subjects are becoming precarious existences within it. In particular, it points out the phenomenon of humans transforming into 'chatbots' that lose their own 'lack' and pursue mechanical efficiency within the new power structures called techno-libertarianism and technofeudalism.

From Neoliberalism to Techno-Libertarianism: Humans Must Now Optimize Themselves
If neoliberalism demanded that humans "manage yourself like a company," techno-libertarianism demands not just managing workforce and career but optimizing body, cognition, emotion, time, and concentration through technology. Sleep must be managed with a smartwatch, emotions tracked with an app, productivity increased with AI, and oneself continuously improved following routines presented by algorithms. At this point, technology becomes part of a system that commands humans to "become a more efficient existence."
Today people cannot concentrate, get tired easily, constantly compare themselves, and are tormented by a sense of falling behind. These problems are usually attributed to "lack of self-management" or "mental problems." However, the paper reads these symptoms as traces of the pressure that techno-capitalism exerts on humans being inscribed in body and mind. In other words, symptoms are not failures but traces of systemic contradictions inscribed in humans.

The Birth of Technofeudalism and Digital Serfs
The paper hints at the problem of technofeudalism beyond platform capitalism. Platforms own and control not just market participants but the market itself. In traditional capitalism, companies competed within the market. However, today's platform companies seize the very digital spaces where people transact, speak, work, and present themselves. This space is a kind of digital land. People live on it, but do not own that land.

 The author focuses not on individuals' capabilities to utilize technology but on the power structure that owns, designs, and sets rules for technology. So inequality in the AI era is not simply a digital literacy problem but a problem of ownership and control. Many discussions flow in the direction of "you must use AI well to survive." But such words, while sounding like practical advice on the surface, simultaneously reduce structural problems to individual capability problems. However, the paper argues that precarious lives in the AI era arise not because individuals are lazy or behind the times, but because those who own data, platforms, and algorithms are reorganizing the very conditions of human activity.

Externalization of the Unconscious by Generative AI: Emergence of the Unconscious Without Responsibility
Generative AI operates as a symbolic medium that goes beyond mimicking human language patterns to reflect and transform humans' unconscious desires. According to Zizek, contemporary digital media externalize the subject's unconscious, and in this process 'the unconscious without responsibility' emerges. Subjects delegate judgment and communication to AI systems, making possible responsibility avoidance of the type "that wasn't something I did, it was something AI did." As a result, the subject's existential engagement and moral responsibility evaporate, and a crisis is reached where only the authority of mechanical judgment lacking shame or guilt is strengthened.

Humans Resembling Chatbots and Elimination of Sexual Gap
AI's true threat is not machines becoming like humans but 'humans changing to become like chatbots.' Humans are fundamentally formed as subjects through the 'structural impossibility' arising from conflict, contradiction, and relationships with others. However, AI tries to remove the fundamental contradictions constituting human finitude by replacing this impossibility with mechanical efficiency and optimized responses. When humans comply with the smooth flow provided by systems while losing their deficiency and gap, the existential anguish and subjective place that made humans human are eliminated.