WORK
Xerox and Infinity
Baudrillard's 1988 essay — written two years before the World Wide Web existed — that named AI's central danger with uncanny precision: not that machines would think but that they would provide the
spectacle of thought, freeing humans from thought's ambiguity.
Xerox and Infinity (
Xérox et l'infini) is a short essay Baudrillard wrote for the French publisher Touchepas in 1988, later collected in English translations of his work. It is among his most prescient texts. Published before the World Wide Web, before graphical consumer interfaces, before any serious large language model, the essay identified the specific form AI's threat would take: not the replacement of human thought by machine thought, but the
substitution of the spectacle of thought for the thing itself. The crucial passage — "it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought" — is precise. The fear is not that machines would think. The fear is that machines would provide what thought produces, and that humans, relieved of the burden of thinking, would gratefully accept the outputs as substitutes. The