From Instrumental Reason to Artificial Intelligence: Rationalization as a Tool for Domination

Abstract

This research paper attempts to examine instrumental reason and artificial intelligence as tools for controlling humans and nature, so that humans become masters and owners of nature. The features of this control over humans and nature increased with the dawn of the Enlightenment philosophy in Europe, through general values ​​represented by reason as a thought based on rational knowledge, critical questioning as scrutiny and explanation, freedom as maturity without guardianship and independence without dependency, and development as a continuous process of growth and prosperity. However, the values ​​of the Enlightenment, and then modernity, were turned into the opposite, as rationality turned into more tyranny after the discovery of artificial intelligence software. Freedom has been transformed into more restrictions, control, and oppression. Development has become a form of technological rationalization (intelligent technology), manifested in the exploitation of artificial intelligence by media and economic institutions to impose a culture of social control. This is achieved by subjecting individuals to mechanisms of control, surveillance, and repression. Consequently, under the artificial intelligence system- a more advanced form of instrumental rationality-modern humans have been transformed into robots, confined within the framework of pervasive materialism and destructive individualism. Capitalist and economic institutions control their behavior within society and within the institutional framework.