Digital Chrono-epistemology, or Artificial Intelligence from Instrument to Institution

For Deleuze, an institution is a procedure of satisfaction, or the human development of artificial means to achieve that satisfaction. Importantly, the reason for the ‘specific’ human prerogative over this instituting procedure lies in the possibility of indecision which characterises human cognition, a possibility which leaves space (and time) for intelligence to pre-empt, prevent and plan. Generally speaking, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are today strongly influencing the human institutions which have preceded and will likely outlive them. Yet, it is possible to conceive, together with the question of algorithms and institutions, a parallel definition of algorithms as institutions. If to institute means to organise the means into a world, the instrumental vision of AI as an organising tool can be replaced with the idea of AI as an autonomous instituting entity whose operational velocity is increasingly and variously intervening on human organisations, introducing its own ‘digital chrono-epistemology’, or its own temporal frame, to the world.