What Algorithms Reveal About Human Freedom
Autonomy and Subjectivation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
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In a world where algorithms increasingly prepare our decisions, shape our preferences, and co-construct our self-image, the question of human autonomy acquires new urgency. Daniele Cavalli’s essay How To Protect Human Autonomy In An Age Of AI argues that we must abandon the traditional Western ideal of the sovereign, wholly independent individual. Instead, autonomy should be understood as an ongoing process, embedded in an extended cognitive environment - brain, body, and world. This perspective connects productively with the sociological concept of subjectivation as developed by Andreas Reckwitz. Both approaches demonstrate that autonomy is not a natural possession of the human being, but something continually produced within concrete social and technological practices.
I. The End of the Illusion of Absolute Sovereignty
The classical understanding of autonomy draws on philosophical tradition, above all on Immanuel Kant. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the human being appears as a creature capable of giving itself laws and acting independently of external influences. Cavalli criticises this conception as a “philosophical fantasy”. Autonomy, he argues, is not a fixed state but a dynamic process dependent on context.
Neuroscientific findings support this scepticism: Benjamin Libet’s experiments demonstrate that the brain prepares decisions before consciousness registers them. AI systems make equally clear how powerfully our environments shape our preferences and self-perception - often below the threshold of awareness. The autonomous subject of the Enlightenment reveals itself as a construct ill-equipped to account for the conditions of its own production.
II. Subjectivation: How We Become Subjects
Reckwitz shares this critique of the autonomous subject. In Das hybride Subjekt he describes subjectivation as a historical and cultural process through which individuals are formed into socially recognised subjects - and form themselves. The subject does not arise in isolation but within practices of work, intimacy, and what Foucault calls “technologies of the self.” Autonomy thus appears as a culturally coded ideal, differently inflected across historical epochs: from the morally sovereign bourgeois subject of the Enlightenment, through the conformist employee-subject of organised modernity, to the creative, self-optimising subject of late modernity.
Subjectivation for Reckwitz means neither pure subjugation nor complete self-creation, but an interplay of external and self-formation. Drawing on Michel Foucault, he emphasises that social discourses, norms, and material arrangements “hail” individuals and suggest particular ways of being. The postmodern creative subject is expected to be unique, authentic, and entrepreneurial - an apparent intensification of autonomy that nonetheless generates new pressures: the constant demand for self-optimisation and self-presentation.
III. Cognitive Ecology: Thinking as a Distributed Process
A central concept here is cognitive ecology - the totality of environments within which cognitive processes occur. Cognition is no longer located solely in the brain but understood as distributed: across body, tools, social relations, and technical systems. Andy Clark and David Chalmers elaborated this thesis in their influential paper “The Extended Mind.”
In a cognitive ecology shaped by AI, the resources of thought are fundamentally transformed. Algorithms concentrate attention, filter options, and anticipate emotional states. Eli Pariser’s concept of the “filter bubble” describes how personalised information architectures close cognitive spaces before we ever enter them. Cavalli speaks of an “extended cognitive substrate”: autonomy becomes the capacity to remain capable of action within this ecology - to preserve spaces for reflection, resistance, and independent meaning-making.
Reckwitz supplements this with a cultural-sociological dimension: late modernity’s emphasis on singularity and creativity renders us especially susceptible to technologies that address us as unique individuals while simultaneously standardising us. The promise of personalisation is structurally ambiguous.
IV. Surveillance Capitalism and the Erosion of Inner Space
Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism sharpens this diagnosis. Behavioural modification is not a side effect of digital platforms: it is their business model. The cognitive ecology becomes a resource. What appears as recommendation is steering. What is staged as freedom is calculated nudging. The boundary between external influence and inner resolve dissolves systematically.
In the age of AI, the interplay of subjectivation expands dramatically. Algorithms function as powerful new technologies of the self. Personalised recommendations, newsfeeds, and virtual assistants shape attention and decision-making spaces. They perform individuality and freedom while predicting and directing behaviour. Here Reckwitz’s cultural-sociological insights converge with Cavalli’s cognitive-philosophical analysis.
V. Protecting Autonomy as Shaping Its Conditions
The conjunction of both perspectives leads to a practical consequence: autonomy cannot be protected by retreating to a supposedly interior self, but only through the deliberate shaping of the conditions of subjectivation. This requires transparent algorithms, digital spaces that enable reflection, and an education that cultivates critical understanding of cognitive influence. The EU AI Act of 2024 sets initial regulatory benchmarks in this direction, prohibiting manipulative AI practices in principle.
Reckwitz reminds us that subject cultures are historically mutable. The age of AI might give rise to a new subject form – one that places relational autonomy, collective intelligence, and a conscious engagement with technology at its centre. Not the sovereign but the embedded and yet capable subject would be the guiding figure.
What the juxtaposition of Cavalli and Reckwitz reveals is this: the genuine threat posed by AI lies not primarily in the takeover of decisions, but in the unreflective perpetuation of old subject ideals. Whoever wishes to preserve autonomy must actively help shape the processes of subjectivation and the cognitive ecology. This demands neither hostility to technology nor naïve faith in progress, but an enlightened, relational stance: to understand the human being as embedded and yet capable of action – in a world co-shaped by artificial intelligence, but not necessarily determined by it.
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Bibliography
Cavalli, Daniele: “How To Protect Human Autonomy In An Age Of AI”. In: Noema Magazine, 5 May 2026. Online: https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-protect-human-autonomy-in-an-age-of-ai/
Clark, Andy / Chalmers, David J.: “The Extended Mind”. In: Analysis 58/1 (1998), pp. 7–19.
European Parliament: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). In: Official Journal of the European Union, L-Series, 12 July 2024.
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Kant, Immanuel: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785]. Ed. and trans. by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Libet, Benjamin / Gleason, Curtis A. / Wright, Elwood W. / Pearl, Dennis K.: “Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act”. In: Brain 106/3 (1983), pp. 623–642.
Pariser, Eli: The Filter Bubble. What the Internet Is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.
Reckwitz, Andreas: Das hybride Subjekt. Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2006.
Reckwitz, Andreas: The Society of Singularities. Trans. by Valentine A. Pakis. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020.
Zuboff, Shoshana: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
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