Tolle Lege: An Augustinian Journal of Philosophy and Theology

Artificial intelligence is now one of the biggest agents in contemporary knowledge production and social order construction. AI systems increasingly mediate institutional practice, ranging from diagnostics in healthcare to forecasting in finance, from law enforcement to moderation of truth. Such technologies are far from being neutral but operate to shape reality while inscribing social hierarchies onto digital infrastructures. This is similar to Michel Foucault’s thought on power and knowledge. Foucault chronicles prisons, schools, and hospitals as "mechanisms of discipline" that construct knowledge about individuals as thoroughly as they regulate them. This can be applied to AI systems that sort, analyze, and rank populations of people by algorithms. The study unveils three processes of algorithmic power: institutionalizing AI as epistemic authority, data-driven creation of social norms, and automatic marginalization of subjugated knowledges. But in drawing on Foucault's rule that ‘where there is power, there is resistance,’ we map new spaces for counter-conduct ranging from algorithmic activism to co-design that subvert AI’s disciplinary logic. In conclusion, we make an argument for reconceptualizing AI as an instrument for knowledge-emancipation, setting forth practical principles for democratic governance of algorithms. Through an application of Foucault's critical optic to contemporary technologies, this analysis presents at the same time an alarm about AI’s potential to normalize as much as an instruction for cultivating resistant subjectivities in an era of algorithms.

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