The Post-Turing Condition: Conceptualising Artificial Subjectivity and Synthetic Sociality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for understanding how AI influences social coordination and meaning, emphasizing the risk of human exclusion and proposing design principles to embed humans within AI social systems.

Contribution

It presents the PRMO framework linking AI design to human subjectivity and introduces Quadrangulation as a novel principle for socially embedded AI systems.

Findings

Defines the Post-Turing condition and its implications for AI and society.

Introduces the PRMO framework connecting AI design to human subjectivity.

Proposes Quadrangulation to ensure human inclusion in AI social interactions.

Abstract

In the Post-Turing era, artificial intelligence increasingly shapes social coordination and meaning formation rather than merely automating cognitive tasks. The central challenge is therefore not whether machines become conscious, but whether processes of interpretation and shared reference are progressively automated in ways that marginalize human participation. This paper introduces the PRMO framework, relating AI design trajectories to four constitutive dimensions of human subjectivity: Perception, Representation, Meaning, and the Real. Within this framework, Synthetic Sociality denotes a technological horizon in which artificial agents negotiate coherence and social order primarily among themselves, raising the structural risk of human exclusion from meaning formation. To address this risk, the paper proposes Quadrangulation as a design principle for socially embedded AI systems, requiring artificial agents to treat the human subject as a constitutive reference within shared contexts of meaning. This work is a conceptual perspective that contributes a structural vocabulary for analyzing AI systems at the intersection of computation and society, without proposing a specific technical implementation.