From the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithm
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Eliyas Kebede Zemedkun presents a profound philosophical treatise titled From the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithm: Cognitive Alienation, Metaphysical Disintegration, and the Information Contract. The work offers a critical examination of the socio cultural and political evolution of humanity, interrogating the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary society and postulating a speculative rational prediction of our future trajectory. As the author observes, humanity began in confusion, and it seems destined to end in confusion. Our ancestors were perplexed by life, their environment, external realities, and their own purpose, leading them to question, philosophize, and formulate a multitude of speculative perspectives through mythological and philosophical theses. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for understanding, humanity turned inward to its own consciousness and spirit, resorting to pure reason and the worship of the Logos, which ultimately replaced Zeus. Yet, in time, man grew to doubt his own soul, partially abandoning the pure exercise of the Logos to embrace the school of empiricism, declaring that what the sensory organs feel supersedes what the mind thinks or consciousness dictates. This epistemology reduces everything to material reality, exposing the human soul to a profound thirst for spirituality and philosophy, because material knowledge feeds our biology whereas philosophy and imagination feed our soul. The author traces the vast historical trajectories of polity, economy, culture, and epistemology, noting how political systems evolved from gerontocracy and aristocracy to technocracy and finally to algocracy, where algorithms and automated systems govern the public sphere. Economically, human society traversed through feudalism, industrial capitalism, digital capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism, which constitutes algorithmic capitalism. Culturally and epistemically, humanity shifted through five major stages, culminating in digital, algorithmic, and artificial intelligence mediated culture and knowledge. Ultimately, this historical trajectory culminated in the creation of a new God and master: the Algorithm, materialized in the form of artificial intelligence. Truth has migrated progressively from God to Logos, from mind to the physical world, and finally to the algorithm, leaving humanity to alienate the burden of proving truth and the active pursuit of truth onto machines. Confronting a profound existential void, humanity faces the post human predicament where the total sum of its millennial old values is surrendered to machines. Transitioning from labor exploitation to cognitive exploitation, which the author terms the highest and worst form of exploitation, the digital era harvests our cognitive or mental labor, thoughts, creative writings, music, poems, language, and art as data that trains artificial intelligence models through surveillance capitalism. Through the automation paradox, artificial intelligence accelerates capitalism self destruction by dispossessing the public of income through massive unemployment, exposing capitalism as an autophagic or self eating system. Applying Hegel master slave dialectic, the author warns that as artificial intelligence acts as our cognitive slave, our own cognitive capacity will gradually diminish, threatening our cognitive sovereignty and causing global intellectual alienation. Invoking Nietzsche, the author warns of the demise of the will to power and the rise of the Last Man, who is comfortable, unthinking, and devoid of great passions or creativity. Furthermore, humanity risks degenerating into prompting animals whose only distinguishing skill from a chimpanzee will be the ability to write a prompt, while Foucault concepts of disciplinary power and Marcuse notion of the one dimensional digital man illustrate how artificial intelligence predictive algorithms normalize human behavior and castrate critical faculties. The journey of truth represents a perpetual search for a permanent home, moving from myth to philosophy, from religion to science, and ultimately from science to the algorithm. Because the will to truth has died and modern society suffers from a cognitive state of nature, objective reality is replaced by the rule of emotions and algorithmic echo chambers. To rescue the general will and national cohesion, the author introduces an original institutional solution known as the Information Contract. Articulated as a universal covenant among citizens, governments, and non governmental institutions to preserve the integrity of information, the Information Contract is grounded in the reciprocal social promise of mutual veracity or the fundamental pledge of do not deceive me, and I shall not deceive you. By bridging state formation and nation building, aligning with Hegelian philosophy and the philosophy of Medemer, the Information Contract ensures that information integrity prevails, rescuing human civilization from digital anarchy and restoring the foundational engine of human progress.
Author: Zemedkun, Eliyas Kebede Zemedkun
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225614555