The Singularity to come and Precarious Lives: AI, the Unconscious, and the Barred Subjects

This paper analyzes the impact of generative AI and the technological singularity on human subjectivity, the unconscious, and social structures. As technological advancements accelerate, AI is no longer just a tool but deeply integrates into human cognition, emotions, desires, and the unconscious. Drawing on Žižek and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this study explores the interaction between AI and the unconscious, focusing on how techno-liberalism reshape power structures and subject formation. First, as neoliberalism merges with techno-liberalism, individuals face increasing pressure to optimize themselves as “entrepreneurs of himself”, with AI further reinforcing this compulsion. Additionally, AI-driven digital environments transform the structure of desire, externalizing the unconscious and dismantling traditional symbolic order and lack. AI not only mirrors human unconscious structures but also generates new forms of desire, leading to a shift where human subjects gradually “become chatbot-like” in their engagement with digital systems. In this technological landscape, anxiety and stress are not merely individual symptoms but structural effects of the techno-liberal order. Rather than reducing these to pathological conditions, this paper argues that such symptoms expose contradictions within techno-capitalism, offering spaces for resistance and potential liberation. Finally, this paper examines how, in the AI era, human subjectivity can resist the techno-capitalist drive to eliminate lack and contradiction, instead mobilizing death drive as a force for the production of new signifiers(S1). Through this strategy, the subject remains an ethical agent within technological environments, sustaining a critical position in the face of AI-driven transformations.