The Last Prison: Why Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish Matters More in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
# **Introduction: The Last Prison in the Age of Artificial Intelligence** Few philosophical books have become more relevant in the twenty-first century than Michel Foucault's *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison*. Published in 1975, decades before the internet, social media, smartphones or artificial intelligence, the book anticipated one of the defining features of our age: the replacement of visible coercion with invisible systems of surveillance, classification and behavioural control. Today its most famous sentence—"the soul is the prison of the body"—sounds less like an abstract philosophical metaphor and more like a precise description of contemporary digital life. At first sight, Foucault's statement appears to contradict more than two thousand years of Western philosophy. Since Plato popularised the Orphic doctrine of *Sōma Sēma*—the body as the prison or tomb of the soul—Western civilisation largely accepted that the immortal soul represented hu...