Metaphorum 2026 · Barefoot Cybernetics

Artificial intelligence as a liberty machine. A metamodelization of barefoot cybernetics

Stafford Beer invented a metasystemic language to produce liberty machines of competent information, with which we could empower human freedom. Good old fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI) models are articulated to the hierarchical organizations, dominated by the signifiers of money and the white, wise, colonizer, patriarchal bureaucrat. GOFAI is steered by grand narratives such as the constant development and the control of risks through cyberopticon (Sarafidis, Theodor). Data in GOFAI is processed through representational reductionist models, which are critical for the “management of affairs”. (Beer, Stafford). Liberty AI machines (LAIM) are based on an ecosophic and eudemonic ethos (Beer Stafford, Guattari Felix) that emerges from the viable organization of human affects, emotions, meanings, qualia, representations, intents and actions (Sarafidis). They are constructed as systems (De Angelis, Massimo) by the viable heterarchical organizations of commoners. LAIM are part of machinic phyla (Φ) in open systems or rhizomes (Deleuze & Guattari), operating through a reticulum of the Viable System Model (Beer), the Schizoanalysis (Guattari), the Human Scale Development or Barefoot economics (Max-Neff, Manfred) and Cybersemiotics. LAIM as barefoot machines respect the 'plurality of the commoners' (de Angelis) as autopoietic assemblages of territories of the selves (T), universal references (U), machinic phyla (Φ) and material and signaletic flows (F) (TUΦF). Experts and citizens form participatory networks to produce informational transducers processing “warm datafication” (Bateson, Nora and Massumi, Brian) rather than big datafication. Warm data are transcontextual and transversal diagrams of TUΦF that feed Barefoot AI, setting up “ligne de fuite” to a symbiotic Gaia. Speaker: Theodor Sarafidis — Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, Athens

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