In their own time, prophets are reckoned to be fools, fabulists, alarmists, or extremists. They invent hyperbolic stories. They might even be called the antichrist. In their own time and in their own land, they are often dismissed with a roll of the eyes or a smirk on the face. They are dismissed by those without ears to hear, because the prophet is scaremongering and because they lack meticulous rigor or analytic precision. They only are recognized as prophets well after the fact.
Such is the case of Günther Anders, an oft-dismissed prophet. With the German publication of The Obsolescence of the Human in 1956, academic philosophers thought Anders was insufficiently philosophical and that he lacked analytic precision in his criticism. The style of the book made matters worse. It is all over the place, blending his own poetry, his personal diary entries, personal stories, phenomenological descriptions, and cultural criticism with traditional philosophical argument. There is also an urgency that confounds the slow plodding tendencies of most philosophers. Anders gives off an air that only the wise (Anders among them) know that it is dusk and that the owl of Minerva is once again taking flight too late. The tech enthusiast thinks he is at the dawn of a new era. And in the brightness of the technological enthusiasm of the mid-1950s, and despite its setting in the midst of a possible nuclear holocaust, Anders—announcing dusk—was dismissed as an alarmist.
Going deeper than Martin Heidegger’s “enframing” critique, Anders probes the psychology that accompanies the enframing. By enframing, Heidegger meant that our technologies shape, literally frame, what it is possible for us to see and know about reality. Anders wants to diagnose why we cannot see our own complicity in the power that enframing holds over us. He wants to find the flaw in us, such that we imagine that we can have a free relation with technology. He wants to describe how we come to love our own pristine creations over against our own fleshiness, and how those creations deceive us as to what they are and who we are.
These are the themes of The Obsolescence of the Human; these themes are still with us, because the flaw is ours. Even today, despite the fact that this prophet has been tested and shown to have deep insight, we do not have ears to hear; in part that is because our epoch insists on analytic precision over intuitive insight. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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Anders frames his discussion by drawing attention to our own marveling stupor in the face of our own creations. We marvel at our creations and at what they can accomplish. The objects of our own creation in the 1950s were not only tools that sculpt the earth, bending the material world to human will, but they were also tools that could destroy the world in a mushroom cloud of radiation.
Other tools at which we marveled in the 1950s include the media—television, radio, and film. These are the tools by which we build our cultural imaginaries. In the era of homo faber, we are the creator of worlds. Compared to the shiny objects of the 1950s, our own products are stunningly brilliant. Artificial Intelligence purports to solve the most knotty intellectual puzzles and social media has made mass communication a real-time, worldwide possibility.
The problem, Anders continues, is that, with our ever more marvelous creations, we develop a kind of Promethean shame. He means that we come to see just how incredibly frail and faulty we are compared to our clever devices, and we are shamed by our frailty. We come to hate the frailty of our fleshiness in relation to the seemingly pristine existences of our Promethean tools. The Promethean gradient between the human and her products is the result of a fault in human desire, made worse by human desire for her own creations. The Promethean gradient is the distance “between making and imagining, the gap between doing and feeling, the gap between knowledge and conscience, and finally and most importantly, the gap between the manufactured device and the human body…” (20). But in order to bring the Promethean gradient into view, Anders has to exaggerate, as he puts it.
Philosophers and scientists don’t care for exaggeration; exaggeration is not a very academic endeavor. Poets exaggerate and prophets exaggerate; they lack of analytic precision.
Yet, when sitting with the book now, Anders could be speaking directly to us. His objects of inquiry were twofold: the possibility of nuclear war and the problematics of mass media (radio, television, and film). We sit at the same precipice of possible destruction, while technological optimism circulates around the world. There is even the possibility of a third world war, not to mention the looming climate crisis. Yet, technological optimism promises us AI, the godlike tool that is far superior to our own rational capacities. AI can solve all our problems.
The Promethean gradient could not be more stark. As in Anders’s time, we who speak into the spaces of technological optimism feel the dismissive attitude toward our own work as we give warning to be wary of all that AI promises. We still fear our destruction, and yet we still fear that our only hope is technological.
On the one side, war is justified by appeals to human freedom and human rights, but it actually is about securing the energy to run our technocultures. The amount of energy required to run data centers to meet our AI “needs” will only exacerbate the energy crisis; the production and use of more energy will only worsen the climate crisis, making cataclysmic weather events more likely. Or worse, a nuclear weapon in the “wrong” hands could destroy our bright AI future. So, we go to war to prevent a war so that we can execute our optimistic plans for technological utopias.
On the other side, just as it was with the mass media culture of the 1950s, so it is with us. The 1950s created the mind-numbing monoculture of Western values (Hollywood, technocapitalist values): think of the 1950s teeny-bopper melodramas or the 1960s spaghetti Westerns. Today’s social media, rife with 20-something-year-old influencers, are likewise spreading habits of superficial desire while looping us further into the matrix of capital’s domination.
Meanwhile, the tech-optimists—the tech bros—offer their salvific services to us out of the depths of their humane spiritual values to navigate us through these perils. They have made a deal with the government (or is it a deal with the devil?) to get access to power, aligning themselves with the narcissistic whims of a man formed in the culture of teeny-bopper melodramas and spaghetti Westerns. In case the deal goes wrong, they are building bunkers on islands and in remote areas to ride through the potential cataclysm, for which they themselves are the catalysts.
For the prophet, it is always the case that the more things change, the more they stay the same. A prophet sees deeply into the structures of the system that they are critiquing. They see deeply into the structures because the structures are created to sate the desires of the human heart. The problem is the human heart. The human heart is habituated to see the world through the lens of those structures and those tools. Our hearts are restlessly clamoring to find satiation in vain things, as Augustine noted long ago (Augustine, Confessions I:15; II: 5).
We humans are enigmas to ourselves. We only come to know ourselves in relation to the things we encounter, both the things of nature and in the things of our own creation. We create our human cultures in our own images and likenesses, and then we come to see ourselves as lesser than our own creations. The subtlety of this process makes it hard for us to see it.
Anders proclaims that these images of our own creation—images of ourselves made for ourselves—are phantoms, which in turn come to represent something solid about ourselves. The medium is the matrix, a mold that reproduces the next mass-produced human identity. We become identical to the creations we made for the purposes of creating identical selves. Put differently, we build our hopes and desires into our devices, and then we come to see ourselves as lesser than the devices; we come to see how frail we are because AI can “think” better than we do. The map becomes the territory; the model becomes the thing. The Intelligence Quotient test becomes what intelligence is. The test or the model becomes the solid gold test or model, and all the human things measured up against it seem so much less than the solidity of the model. That is to say, “The whole becomes less true than the sum of its individually true parts…” (144). The real whole becomes the ghost, because the model has intellectual heft.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. For we have always been technological. Our primordial tools like voice and language have always mediated between the real and the object of intellectual construction. It has always been the case that we humans are relational, such that our identity formation depends on the cultural technics of our day to mediate the relation between the real and the mental object. The cultural “we” produces through habituation individual identities of the next generation through phantoms and matrices. In his study of cultural technics, Walter Ong argues that human forms of rationality in oral cultures differ from the forms of rationality in literate cultures.
The ancients recognized in themselves the capacity for memory but also memory’s frailty, so they made a memory device, a wax tablet. Then, the human mind was likened to a wax tablet. The early moderns created slates as educational devices; then, the human mind was likened to a blank slate. Freud likened the human mind to a steam engine, with drives and pressures and the need to blow off steam; his theory of mind is built around the model of the steam engine.
Today, an LLM has a memory (all the data of past experiments and knowledge), it reasons (it processes vast amounts of data), and it anticipates a future (it models possible futures). This phantom, the LLM, has become the standard for human thought, standing in for the limited ways that our limited, fleshy brains think. LLMs “think” better than we do, or so the story goes.
Take another example: the way people imagine moral thinking in relation to Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS). A formalized system of ethical principles fits perfectly in the formalized logics of AI algorithms. The formalized ethical architecture of AWS is built on International Humanitarian Law, sometimes referred to as the law of armed conflict. War-making authorities then program the mission into the AWS device.
Because the formalized, encoded law of armed conflict governs AWS activities, warfare supposedly will be more moral than it has ever been. In the rhetoric of AWS, no AWS device will ever result in a My Lai massacre, where rogue American soldiers began to slaughter innocent villagers. AWS will be more moral than the pathetic, fleshy morality of human beings. Though we may never know whether an AWS will know to intervene the way that Hugh Thompson did, landing his helicopter between the rogue American soldiers and the victims of their attack.
The point is that our devices come to stand in for all that is good and true and beautiful about us humans. What could be more pristine than pure rational thought and a moral machine, avoiding all the messy fleshiness, frailty, and fragility of being human.
Human intellect, built upon the analytic-synthetic capacities of mind, creates our tools and devices. We project our desires and our capacities into these devices, which then do a better job at doing the things we do; or so the story goes. Put differently, the work of the scientific mind and its resultant technological creations are imagined to be the best we have to offer, better than our own intellectual and moral frailties. They are Promethean gods made in the image of us at our best, and we fade in comparison.
The prophet goes unheard because the musings of a father in his diaries or of a poet who intuits something amiss in our tech-creations do not raise the alarm. Look at our accomplishments, they say. The prophet’s critique cannot touch our beautiful creations. The words of poetic insight make no sense to the powerful logics of techne.
What prophets lack in analytic precision, they gain through intuition. Analytic precision gives the semblance of a more precise understanding of beings, created and natural, if by understanding we mean the ability to describe, in mathematical symbols, precisely what is happening at every level of machine use. However, what Henri Bergson noted about science after Kant is true today: science is becoming less and less objective (meaning knowledge about objects) and more and more symbolical, representational, phantom-like. Our models and devices, constructed out of the work of intellect, have become the true image of a reality, better than reality.
Yet, the intuitive feeling that something is amiss is precisely what calls the prophet to speak. The prophet feels the discomfort—vague and evanescent though it may be—of the phantom model of reality, and the prophet feels called to put words to that feeling. This effort requires the interpretative sensibility of a poet, not the analytic precision of the philosopher. To the possessor of the hermeneutics of analyticity, the poet or the prophet is not speaking about technology, thus she can have nothing to say about its creation. Paraphrasing Heidegger, who paraphrased Hölderlin, where the dangerous feeling arises, there also the hope. Where the prophet intuits the danger and announces that we are at dusk, there wisdom may take flight.
The problem is that the ability to recognize the danger is too subtle for the analytic-synthetic work of technoscience. However, as Bergson also notes, the work of the technoscientific intellect pretends to stand outside of being and pretends to occupy the god’s-eye position. Human intuition, though imperfect, is how we participate from inside the flow of being in and with our own being. In intuition we have access to wholes; we feel wholes.
Thus, when a prophet like Anders speaks to us about the whole of what is happening in our time, when he does so with poetic urgency, we should sit up and pay attention to the dangers he names. This prophet has spoken truly. May we have ears to hear him.
