The Ontological Drift of Learning: Presence, Authority, And Instrumental Reason in AI Platforms

Abstract: This article presents a conceptually rigorous, argument-driven paper on the ontological and ethical crisis of higher education in the age of AI-mediated learning and platformized new media. Higher education is undergoing an ontological drift: learning is increasingly framed as optimization, efficiency, and measurable outputs, which subtly erodes (a) lived presence in learning, (b) the ethical relation between teacher–student, and (c) the authority of knowledge as a shared, cultivated horizon. Treating AI not as a neutral tool but as a socio-technical mediator that reorganizes attention, temporality, accountability, and what counts as “understanding.”