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How the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted today’s AI 30 years before ChatGPT

theconversation.com · 926 words · saved by 1 readers

Baudrillard’s genius lay in foreseeing what these rudimentary devices like fax machines suggested about likely future uses of technology.

Some writers appear so accurate in their assessment of where society and technology is taking us that they have attracted the label “prophet”. Think of J. G. Ballard, Octavia E. Butler, Marshall McLuhan, or Donna Haraway. One of the most important members of this enlightened club is the philosopher Jean Baudrillard – even though his reputation over the past couple of decades has diminished to an association with a now bygone era when fellow French theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida reigned supreme. In writing our new biography of Baudrillard, however, we have been…

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