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Paper short abstract

Does the computer think? Drawing on ethnography with remote IT workers in Gurugram, India, this paper examines how LLMs mediate the triad of morality, personhood, and intelligence. It introduces “computational anxiety” to show how these triadic properties are distributed in socio-technical field(s).

Paper long abstract

Does the computer think, and if so, what does it mean to think in a world where machine inferences increasingly participate in everyday cognition? This paper revisits long-standing philosophical debates on mind, computation, and understanding by grounding them ethnographically in contemporary practices of remote IT workers in Gurugram, India whose understandings of morality, personhood and intelligence are mediated by large language models (LLMs).

Building on earlier critiques of technological singularity, so-called mind uploads and the computational theories of mind, the paper shifts attention from speculative futures to the "mundaneness", where intelligence is already distributed across humans, algorithms, platforms, and infrastructures. Drawing on ethnography with remote IT workers, I introduce the concept of “computational anxiety,” and how it reshapes what it means to understand the traid of morality, personhood and intelligence as objects are treated like thinking subjects.

Theoretically, the paper engages debates on computation and mind by revisiting the distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how, arguing that while LLMs may never experience or understand in a phenomenological and psychoanalytic sense, they nonetheless reorganise the everyday epistomologies of understanding. In dialogue with STS and psychoanalytic approaches to Gen. AI, particularly by employing Luca Possati's "technoanalysis", I argue that intelligence is not an internal property of brains or machines, but an anxious, and socio-technical practice. Further, this dialogue unfolds how emerging technologies open new pathways for understanding “to understand” sentience by embedding computational epistemologies into everyday life. Lastly, we will rethink what it could mean for Trans/[H]umans in a post-colonial and polarised world?