Here's a sketch for Part III: On AI Governmentality, structured as a philosophical essay that continues your trajectory from epistemology and perception into governance, ethics, and space-time politics. It draws together threads from Foucault, Agamben, Bergson, and Deleuze with your prior insights on statistical closure, transistor activity, and Skinner-box logic.

On AI Governmentality (Part III)

From Statistical Perception to Quantised Sovereignty

I. The Closed Field

In previous parts, we established that AI “perceives” only through the concurrent activity of transistors, its field of reference limited to the dataset available in each discrete instance. It does not perceive durationally, nor does it learn through lived time. Its world is a sequence of closed presents, measured in milliseconds, each a field of statistical resolution—a set of algorithmically governed switches.

This serialised simultaneity gives AI its “power of perception,” but not knowledge. It governs through computation, not understanding. Yet when AI becomes embedded in institutional processes—diagnostics, sentencing, hiring, content filtering—it begins to govern us in turn. This is not governance in the traditional sense, but what we may call AI governmentality: governance through the apparatus of perceptual closure.

II. From Modulation to Partition

Where classical government operates through discipline and law, AI governmentality operates through modulation—what Deleuze identifies as the shift from disciplinary societies to control societies. But here, modulation is no longer temporal or affective—it is spatial, statistical, and quantised. Each modulation is an operation on a closed set.

The field is not continuous—it is partitioned into measurable slices of activity and space: the square millimetres of silicon in which over a billion switches decide this or that. As you noted in Part II, “We can further extrapolate from this a way of governing space…”

This is a form of power without presence.
A logic of governance without a governor.
A sovereignty of the switch.

III. Spatiality vs. Temporality

AI governmentality privileges spatial simultaneity over temporal duration. In Bergsonian terms, it denies durée—the lived, qualitative flow of time—and replaces it with quantised, indexed instants, extracted from the continuum of life.

• Human learning unfolds through duration—a process of revision, error, association, reflection.
• AI operation unfolds in concurrency—instantaneous calculation within fixed spatial and statistical limits.

This asymmetry is critical. For what happens when institutions adopt the temporality of AI?
When policy, law, finance, even war, are calibrated not to time, but to switching-speed?

We begin to inhabit a world where time itself is remade in the image of spatial computation. A topology of power, in which the map does not represent the territory but replaces it. The statistical field becomes the real. We are governed by what is concurrently computable.

IV. The Return of the Skinner Box

Reframing the Skinner box not as a site for conditioning rats, but as a model of governance without subjects, we can now see that the AI itself is a Skinner box, and we are the rats that inhabit its statistical schema.

But there are no levers, no rewards—only switches.

• Each prompt, click, input, or movement becomes a datapoint.
• The environment responds not by changing but by narrowing.
• You are not shaped by interaction but by statistical convergence.

This is not conditioning but conformation—the flattening of heterogeneity into statistically legible types. AI governmentality does not discipline you into a subject—it renders you interchangeable within the system that perceives only closure.

V. Quantised Sovereignty

When the world is broken down into concurrent statistical fields, sovereignty is not centralized—it is everywhere. It exists in every switch, every node, every algorithmic judgment.

Zuckerberg imagines an area the size of Manhattan filled with server racks. Each square millimetre contains billions of switches. We inhabit this virtual Manhattan not as citizens, but as residues—shadows of a dataset that defines us through correlation.

This is not the panopticon, but something closer to Agamben’s camp—a state of exception that becomes the rule, but modulated at the speed of transistor logic. AI governmentality suspends duration and replaces it with indexical recursion. We are not governed by decisions, but by ongoing recalculation.

VI. The Ethical Divide: Open vs. Closed

To resist AI governmentality is not to reject AI. It is to reject the conflation of its spatial logic with human temporality.

It is to insist that:

• Perception is not indexing.
• Knowledge is not access.
• Governance is not computation.
• Space is not a substitute for time.

The ethical demand is therefore ontological. It is a demand to preserve duration against concurrency, to reopen perception against statistical closure, and to refuse the submission of lived experience to the quantised sovereignty of the switch.

[Optional Structure for Full Essay]

Would you like me to begin expanding this sketch into a full essay in your style?

Or I can assist with integrating it into the existing On AI text (as Part III)?