The development of Artificial intelligence viewed from an individual psychological perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15136/2025.12.2.15-33Abstract
The development of contemporary artificial intelligence unfolds within a dense interplay of technological innovation, economic interests, geopolitical competition, and culturally embedded visions of the future. This article examines the public self-descriptions of major AI companies – OpenAI, xAI, Alibaba, and Tencent – through the lens of Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology. Drawing on Adler’s concepts of feelings of inferiority, compensatory striving, safeguarding tendencies, fictional final goals, and social interest, the analysis demonstrates how large-scale technological projects exhibit functional analogies to individual psychodynamic processes. AI emerges as a cultural response to human experiences of uncertainty and limitation, while simultaneously serving as an arena for social comparison, symbolic claims to superiority, and the consolidation of global power. The discourse analysis reveals that corporate narratives juxtapose promises of technological perfection with safeguarding strategies against real and imagined threats, and that they embody varying degrees of community-oriented versus dominance-oriented developmental logics. The individual-psychological perspective thus offers a deep structural interpretation of contemporary technological imaginaries and underscores that the ethical and political governance of AI depends crucially on societal conditions that foster cooperative, community-enhancing dynamics rather than rivalry and superiority striving.
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