Camus, Kafka, and the Algorithm: Absurdism in the Age of AI

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. He is not, first, horrified by this. He is concerned about being late for work.

This is Kafka’s register — the absurd presented not as nightmare but as administrative nuisance. The horror is in the inversion: the catastrophic treated as inconvenient, the metaphysically unbearable managed through the vocabulary of ordinary life. The office will expect him. His manager is already suspicious. The rent is due.

I’ve been thinking about Kafka a great deal lately, for reasons that have nothing to do with entomology.

The Bureau Without a Face

Kafka’s bureaucracies are not malicious. That would be simpler. The Castle’s officials are not deliberately tormenting K. — they are indifferent, overwhelmed, operating according to procedures whose origins no one can quite explain, for purposes whose justification has been long since separated from their implementation. The system runs. No one designed it to harm; no one is accountable for the harm it produces. The harm is, in some sense, nobody’s fault.

This is structurally identical to the experience of interacting with large-scale algorithmic systems.

A person’s credit application is rejected. The reason given is “does not meet algorithm requirements.” What requirements? The credit score calculation is proprietary. Which factors were weighted how heavily? Unavailable. Against what comparator pool? Not disclosed. Is there an appeal? There is a form. The form’s outcome is processed by the same algorithm. Try again in six months.

Kafka did not know about machine learning. He understood the phenomenology perfectly.

Camus’s Formulation

Albert Camus gave the tradition its philosophical skeleton in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The Absurd, for Camus, is not a property of the world alone or of the human mind alone. It arises in the confrontation between them — between the human need for meaning, clarity, purpose, and the world’s silence on these matters.

The world does not explain itself. It does not care about your suffering. It offers no inherent meaning for you to inhabit. And yet you persist in demanding one. The Absurd is this demand meeting that silence.

Camus’s question is what to do with this recognition. His answer is to remain in the tension — neither to suicide (eliminating the human side of the confrontation) nor to philosophical suicide, by which he means accepting a religious or ideological meaning-system that forecloses the question. We must live in the gap. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Algorithm as Absurdist Structure

What interests me is how precisely the algorithmic systems that increasingly govern modern life instantiate the structures Camus and Kafka described — and how they do so with a new technological form that Camus and Kafka could not have imagined but would have recognized immediately.

The Silence of the Machine

A language model responses to your question with confident fluency. It does not experience hesitation, embarrassment, or the desire to be honest with you about what it knows and doesn’t know. When it confabulates — generates a plausible-sounding but false answer — it does so with exactly the same fluency as when it produces a true one. The confidence is not a signal of accuracy. It is a property of the generation mechanism.

You ask the person across from you a question and their face tells you something. Hesitation, redirected gaze, the particular pause before a constructed answer — you have millions of years of primate evolution tuned to reading these signals. They’re not perfect, but they’re real information.

The algorithm’s face is its output. The output is smooth. You have been given Camus’s silent universe with a friendly interface and a conversational tone.

The Kafka of Automated Decisions

Multiple countries have now enacted regulations requiring explainability for automated decisions affecting individuals — the EU’s GDPR Article 22, various national financial regulations, healthcare AI governance frameworks. The intention is to provide the human right to know why a consequential decision was made.

The practice is frequently a Kafkaesque parody of this intention. The automated decision system produces an explanation. The explanation is generated by a second system — often itself an AI — trained to produce plausible-sounding justifications for whatever the first system decided. The explanation is not an account of how the decision was actually reached. It is a post-hoc narrative that satisfies the formal requirement of an explanation while providing no actual insight into the causal process.

You have been given a letter from the Castle. It is very official looking. It explains, in formal language, why your application was denied. The explanation was not produced by the process that made the decision.

This is not unique to AI — bureaucratic explanation production has always had this pathology. AI scales it and systematizes it.

Literature’s Persistent Usefulness

There is a genre of technology writing that treats the great concerns of human experience as problems awaiting technical solution. Loneliness is a UX problem. Meaning is a recommendation algorithm problem. Grief is a chatbot problem. The implicit claim is that the human interior is a domain technology has not yet optimized, but eventually will.

Camus and Kafka are useful precisely as counterevidence — not because they argue that technology is bad, but because they articulate something about the structure of certain human experiences that technical frames consistently miss.

The Absurd is not solved by explanation. Explaining why the universe is silent does not make it less silent. Providing an algorithm’s decision tree does not address the experience of being subject to an incomprehensible system. The phenomenological experience — the experience of being Sisyphus, of standing before the Castle’s representatives, of existing in a world that responds to human need with procedure — is not dissolved by understanding the mechanism. It is, if anything, clarified by it.

What Kafka Understood About Power

In Kafka’s best work, the systems are not opposed to the individual through malice. The problem is worse: the systems are indifferent. Officials have procedures. Procedures have lacunae. Nobody is to blame for the lacunae, and nobody has authority to close them. The Castle’s officials work very hard. They are overwhelmed. The paperwork is extensive.

Modern algorithmic governance has this structure. The AI model was trained on historical data. The historical data contains historical biases. The model inherits those biases. Nobody deliberately programmed the bias. The programmers tried hard to avoid it. The bias is systematic and consequential. Nobody is responsible.

This is not a new structural form. It is an ancient one, newly implemented.

The Response That Is Not Naive

Camus’s response to the Absurd was not depression and it was not denial. It was a particular form of clarity — seeing the situation accurately and choosing engagement anyway. Sisyphus knows his boulder will roll back. He pushes it anyway. Camus insists we imagine him happy: not because happiness is deserved or guaranteed, but because the alternative — delusion or despair — is an abdication of consciousness.

Applied to algorithmic systems, this does not mean accepting the situation. The absurdist stance toward an unjust automated system is not passive. It is lucid engagement without the comfort of believing the engagement will certainly succeed or that the system is designed to yield gracefully to legitimate complaint.

It means seeing clearly that the system was not designed to care about your particular case. It means engaging anyway, through the channels that exist, while building toward channels that don’t yet exist. It means holding simultaneously “this is genuinely absurd” and “I am nonetheless going to respond.”

This is not a comfortable political program. It does not resolve into a policy recommendation. It is something more modest and perhaps more durable: a way of engaging with systems that exceed individual understanding and control, without retreating into either resignation or the illusion that you could fully comprehend and master them if only you were sufficiently informed.

Kafka’s fiction has not become less relevant as technology has advanced. It has become an increasingly accurate field guide to the texture of modern bureaucratic experience — a texture that AI is now elaborating with new complexity and new scale.

K. is still waiting to be seen. The officials are very busy. The paperwork has been received.