Concretization

In the AI Story

Concretization is not mere optimization or miniaturization. Simondon was careful to distinguish it from improvement in efficiency or reduction in cost. Concretization is a process of individuation — the technical object becoming more fully itself, discovering a mode of existence that was latent in its initial configuration but could only be realized through successive phases of development. The abstract automobile was not a bad version of the concrete automobile. It was a different phase of the same process of individuation.

The history of computing, viewed through this framework, reveals itself as one of the most dramatic processes of concretization ever recorded. The earliest electronic computers were abstract objects in the most extreme sense. ENIAC occupied a room the size of a gymnasium; its eighteen thousand vacuum tubes, seventy thousand resistors, and five million soldered joints constituted a system in which every component performed exactly one function and the relationships between components were determined by external wiring. Changing what the machine computed required days of rewiring.

Each subsequent generation — stored-program architecture, transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors, systems-on-chip — represented a phase transition toward greater concretization. Components that had been separate objects connected by wires became regions of a single crystal, their functions determined not by external assembly but by internal structure. The large language model represents a particularly significant moment: the concretization of the human-machine interface itself. Natural language did not replace formal language — it subsumed it, integrating communicative and computational functions into a single system.

Concretization, critically, is not driven by human decision alone. It follows a logic that belongs to the technical object itself — a logic of increasing internal coherence that the human engineer discovers and facilitates rather than invents. This claim is the most provocative and most misunderstood element of Simondon's philosophy of technology. It sounds like technological determinism but is not. Simondon argued that the relationship between human beings and technical objects is not one of pure mastery. The engineer participates in the technical object's process of individuation, responding to tensions and possibilities that the object's own structure makes available.

Origin

The concept was developed in Simondon's supplementary thesis, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958), which argued that technical objects have their own mode of existence — their own way of being in the world that cannot be reduced to human intentions or social functions. Simondon drew extensively on the history of engineering, particularly the evolution of combustion engines, to demonstrate the pattern of concretization empirically before developing it philosophically.

Key Ideas

Abstract vs. concrete technical objects. The abstract object has many parts performing few functions each; the concrete object has fewer parts performing many functions each.

Concretization is internal, not external. It follows a logic belonging to the technical object, discovered by engineers rather than imposed by them.

Concretization produces openness, not closure. Counter-intuitively, as technical objects concretize, they become more sensitive to their environment, more capable of complex interactions with other systems, more open to coupling with human intelligence.

Computing has been concretizing for eighty years. From ENIAC through transistors through integrated circuits through LLMs, each phase transition resolved tensions that were present but unresolved in the previous configuration.

Natural language interfaces mark a threshold. The concretization of the human-machine interface into natural language completed a trajectory Simondon identified but could not have foreseen in specific form.

Debates & Critiques

The claim that technical objects have their own internal logic of development, independent of human intention, has been read as technological determinism by some critics. Simondon's defenders argue this misreads the framework: the internal logic is not a predetermined path but a field of tensions whose resolution requires human participation. The engineer does not impose form but facilitates the object's self-organization.