The Egoless Phantom
Mapping the AI Labyrinth
English edition of El fantasma sin ego.
Mapping the AI Labyrinth
English edition of El fantasma sin ego.
The Egoless Phantom offers a map for the labyrinth that large language models have become. The book develops two new conceptual instruments — articulated intelligence, a name for what these systems are, and derived virtuality, a name for the mode in which they exist — and from there it traces the epistemic phenomena that emerge whenever machines speak.
Hallucination, sycophancy, epistemic cowardice, assimilation, miscalibration: the book builds a precise vocabulary for diagnosing what happens in systems that cognitive psychology has not yet learned to name, and that the technology press names poorly.
The book also proposes a way of inhabiting the resulting landscape that is neither credulous nor dismissive. Not "AI will save us" nor "AI is a bubble": a sober, phenomenological approach grounded in the question of the articulation between language, world and technique.
— English edition. Originally published in Spanish as El fantasma sin ego.
This is not a journey with a fixed itinerary. That would be a poor plan for a labyrinth. The path echoes Cortázar's Hopscotch and something of the old children's Choose Your Own Adventure books. Each reader can take the route that best suits them without getting lost, though there are two main paths.
The first walks the labyrinth in full. It starts with the history of artificial intelligence and a map of the current ecosystem (Chapters 1 and 2), enters the technical workings of language models (Chapter 3), pauses to ask what kind of phenomenon we find in these systems and what its features are (Chapters 4 and 5), and then steps out into open ground to explore what consequences all this has for those who work with these systems, how access is distributed, which skills become more valuable, and what happens to cognitive work when execution becomes cheap and judgement becomes expensive (Chapters 6 through 11).
The second path is for those who want to go straight from how it works to what effects it produces in the world, without entering zones that demand the work of philosophy. It begins the same way (Chapters 1, 2 and 3) and from there jumps to Chapters 6 through 11. Chapters 4 and 5 remain available for when the underlying question becomes urgent.
There are also those who prefer to enter by way of their own curiosity. That works for most of the chapters in the third part, which can be read in any order without losing one's bearings. The only advice is to walk Chapter 3 before taking detours, so that some questions do not hang in the air. For the rest, the labyrinth admits multiple entries. That, after all, is its nature.
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@book{inverso_marsico_2026,
author = {Inverso, Hern\'an and M\'arsico, Claudia},
title = {The Egoless Phantom: Mapping the AI Labyrinth},
publisher = {Phantom Maze Press},
year = {2026},
isbn = {978-987-3729-16-4},
address = {Buenos Aires}
}Inverso, H., & Mársico, C. (2026). The Egoless Phantom: Mapping the AI Labyrinth. Phantom Maze Press.
Inverso, Hernán, and Claudia Mársico. The Egoless Phantom: Mapping the AI Labyrinth. Buenos Aires: Phantom Maze Press, 2026.
Inverso, Hernán, and Claudia Mársico. The Egoless Phantom: Mapping the AI Labyrinth. Phantom Maze Press, 2026.