CONCEPT
The Exhaustion of Possibility
Ulrich Bröckling’s name for the specific fatigue produced when the field of possible optimization becomes infinite—when AI removes the last constraint on the entrepreneurial self’s imperative to act, and every unacted-upon possibility is experienced as evidence of inadequacy.
The exhaustion of possibility is the pathological terminus of the
Bröckling analysis applied to AI: not the fatigue of too much work, not the tiredness of a body that has labored beyond its capacity, but the specific exhaustion of a subject confronted with unlimited capability and no criterion for choosing among the possibilities that capability opens—no criterion, that is, that is not itself another optimization.
Alain Ehrenberg’s foundational insight was that depression is the characteristic pathology of a society organized around the imperative to act rather than the prohibition to refrain: in societies of prohibition, the neurotic suffers desire that cannot be expressed; in the achievement society, the depressive suffers the infinite field of possible action and the inability to generate a criterion for choosing among its possibilities that would be adequate to the demands the regime makes. Bröckling’s contribution is to show how AI radicalizes this condition. The collapse of the
imagination-to-artifact ratio—the