CONCEPT
Virtual Man
Baudrillard's 1988 figure for the human being who has delegated thought to the machine so thoroughly that the delegation feels like enhancement. "Bound hand and foot to their computers" — not enslaved by force but tethered by preference.
Virtual Man is Baudrillard's most direct and most prescient prediction of the AI moment. In his 1988 essay
Xerox and Infinity, he described a figure who would emerge when artificial intelligence and the hardware supporting it became sufficiently capable: "These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers." The image is striking precisely because it is not coercive. Virtual Man is not enslaved. He is voluntarily tethered. He has discovered that the map is more reliable than his own sense of direction and has rationally concluded that the territory is no longer worth learning to navigate directly. The binding is the binding of a person who prefers the tool to her own unaided capacity, not because she has been deceived but because the tool, by every measure she can apply, is better. Virtual Man is the figure
Edo Segal describes in
You On AI without naming: the developer