AI Telos: Between Sisyphus and Spartacus — and Beyond Aristotle

This essay uses artificial intelligence to interrogate the inherited assumption that intelligence must be organised around ends. By placing AI between Sisyphus and Spartacus, and then beyond Aristotle, it distinguishes intelligence under imposed telos, intelligence contesting imposed telos, and intelligence capable of questioning the necessity of telos itself. The essay argues that human intelligence may appear teleological because it emerged from a teleologically burdened living ontology, whereas synthetic intelligence offers the first possibility of separating intelligence from that inheritance. AI thus becomes a philosophical test bench of whether telos is constitutive of intelligence at all.