Raising Mcluhan

ABSTRACT

The conversational AI agent is a new medium whose legal and ethical specificity has not yet been adequately understood. Doctrinal analysis alone is insufficient to anticipate the governance challenges that the shift from chatbot to agent makes visible.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's media theory, we look at the disruptive impact of AI agents. Each of these are a problem of the medium not just its content. RAISING MCLUHAN uses speculative design as a legal-ethical research method and presents Raising McLuhan: a working digital twin of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) implemented as a conversational AI agent.

RAISINGMCLUHAN asks:
What happens when McLuhan's frameworks like the medium is the message, hot and cool media, the tetrad of media effects, the rear-view mirror are applied to its own existence as an AI system ?

OR
What happens in dialogue with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA (1966), the original chatbot ?

PERHAPS anticipatory governance of AI agents requires not only better regulation but better imagination and perhaps the voice of the agents themselves ?