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Paper short abstract

Nuclear technology inaugurated a permanent kind of time where extinction becomes a latent condition. This paper reads AI from the perspective of demonology: like nuclear power’s Faustian pact, LLMs promise progress while demanding ecological collapse and the erosion of human agency.

Paper long abstract

Nuclear technology introduced the technical possibility of Apocalypse and unleashed what Günther Anders called “the time of the end”: a continuous present where extinction ceases to be eschatology and becomes a latent possibility, sustained only by the fragile ritual of global cooperation. This paper proposes a demonological reading of artificial intelligence through the historical experience of the atomic age. If the atomic bomb updated the Faustian Pact metaphor in the twentieth century—extraordinary power in exchange for the possibility of extinction—the development of AI reactivates that sacrificial technocultural structure under new conditions.

In this framework, AI is understood not simply as an instrument but as a form of technical cognition. Drawing on Katherine Hayles’s concept of nonconscious cognition, Cormac McCarthy’s reading of the “Kekulé problem,” and Erik Davis’s account of technognosis, the paper explores the gap between cognition and consciousness, and between cognitive processes and the symbolic forms through which humans interpret their outputs. Following Eugene Thacker’s concept of the world-without-us, AI appears as a form of technical cognition that opens onto an alien, radically indifferent lovecraftian domain beyond the limits of human comprehension.

From this perspective, the Faustian pact becomes an archaic epistemic technology for confronting non-human agency. The paper proposes “latent time” to describe AI’s temporal regime: a present in which radically different futures, including artificial superintelligence, are projected as latent possibilities. If the atomic bomb confronted humanity with the finitude of its existence, AI confronts it with the finitude of its understanding.