The Worldless Machine

The Worldless Machine asks what the current moment of AI actually is. Not technically but historically and philosophically. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's distinction between labour, work, and action, it argues that the emergence of large language models is not a rupture but a culmination: the endpoint of two centuries in which the consumption cycle progressively dismantled the conditions under which durable, world-building work was possible. The book proceeds in three movements. The first examines the hard case, whether AI systems understand, and argues that the question calls for legislation rather than discovery: an explicit, revisable, publicly accountable commitment about what shall count. The second traces the invisible labour that produces AI, and what it reveals about the system it produces. The third surveys the historical movements that resisted the same condition: the Luddites, the utopian socialists, the Arts and Crafts practitioners, the Scandinavian cooperative traditions. Each was absorbed. The central danger AI represents is not destruction but simulation: a system that presents itself as making in the relevant sense, at the moment when genuine making has been most thoroughly prepared for replacement.