TITLE:
Artificial Intelligence (A.I). vs A.L. (Autolligence) and the Remix of Creativity: A Critical Genealogy of Cognitive Architectures in Education
AUTHORS:
Chourdakis Antonis, Kounalakis Manolis
KEYWORDS:
Autolligence, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, History of Education, Critico-Praxical Pedagogy
JOURNAL NAME:
Intelligent Control and Automation,
Vol.17 No.4,
November
12,
2026
ABSTRACT: This article proposes autolligence (A.L.) as a counter-term to artificial intelligence (A.I.) in educational discourse. It develops a critical historical genealogy of creativity drawn from the history of education, tracing how the concept was constituted pedagogically and politically, from the school technologies of the nineteenth-century classroom, such as the blackboard and the textbook, to learning management systems (LMS) and generative AI, which are analyzed as cognitive architectures rather than neutral tools. The genealogy culminates in an examination of the epistemological rupture that this historical-political approach produces in cognitive psychology and in the educational technology (edtech) literature on creativity. Both treat creativity as a measurable, optimizable cognitive skill, detached from its historical, pedagogical, and political contexts. On our reading, this abstraction blurs the distinction between executive regulation of thought, a capacity of individual cognition, and institutional control of learners, a historically constituted arrangement, and invites the treatment of human metacognitive regulation as functionally analogous to algorithmic automation. Drawing on the extended mind and distributed cognition frameworks, and on research on cognitive offloading, the article argues that creativity within LMS and generative AI environments tends to be reduced to remix within pre-configured parameters. Autolligence names this systemic condition of educational automation, presenting AI not as a rupture but as an escalation of earlier logics of standardization, metrication, and surveillance. By shifting the focus from the “intelligence” of machines to the organization of learning, the concept situates creativity within the tradition of critico-praxical pedagogy.