ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines artificial intelligence (AI) as an extension of capitalist and technocratic logics, arguing that AI functions not as a neutral tool but as a fantasy structure that manages and conceals capitalism’s contradictions. Using a Lacanian post-Marxist lens, it explores how AI embodies desires for total control, seamless efficiency, and depoliticised governance, while reinforcing inequalities and undermining democratic possibilities. Planning, as a discipline historically aimed at correcting market failures, becomes deeply entangled in these fantasies when integrating AI, risking its reduction to an instrument of optimisation rather than a space for collective negotiation and justice. Drawing on (post)Marxian value theory and critical posthumanist approaches, the chapter suggests reframing AI as a contingent, relational actor within planning, capable of revealing social antagonisms rather than masking them. It calls for an emancipatory practice that embraces uncertainty, fosters ethical cohabitation, and confronts the Real of urban and technological life.
