For Anders, the problem is not that humans have created a world of artifice. Rather, the problem is that in the modern technological environment we make products that are not measured on the basis of human needs but dramatically exceed them.
Günther Anders argues that where St. Ignatius of Loyola, the wounded ex-soldier who founded the Jesuits, thought it necessary to devise what he called “spiritual exercises” for his times, we need new spiritual exercises to train our souls to begin to comprehend what we now can do.
When a prophet like Günther 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.
. . . In other words, Chappie can be read as an allegory that calls for us to recognize our ill-treatment of the other, and the film seeks an alternative ethic that does not recourse immediately or uncritically to fear or hostility, leading to violence. We are to be more embracing of the ‘other’ who is, ultimately, more complex than we might first assume, and is never entirely ‘other’.
In a recent video (Humans Need Not Apply) CGP Grey challenges us to imagine a future in which the majority of human work will be performed by ever-more finely-calibrated machines (coordinated by ever-more complex software). Lest we doubt it, he suggests that the seeds of this future are already with us.
. . . In other words, disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan confront us with the sobering reality that the deepest, deadliest and most intransigent problems we face today are social problems, not technical problems. We continue to deceive ourselves with the hope that if we can but increase our knowledge of the world, our technical know-how at problem-solving the riddles that nature poses for us, we can defeat death and disease.
