Günther Anders remains perhaps one of the most insightful commentators on our present Artificial Intelligence (AI) era, even though he has been dead now for more than 30 years. Although he did not personally witness the accelerated rollout of ever-more AI products and systems, his early observations on computational technologies and his insights into the human-machine condition still hold. Writing in the wake of World War II, amidst the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and during a time when cybernetic technologies were in their infancy, Anders was sharply aware of how the modern condition might progress toward a universe of automated and autonomous technological artefacts designed to alleviate us from all manner of burdens, including the moral burden of decision-making: computational artefacts that ‘now whirr and hum and assume responsibility while humans stand by with as much gratitude as triumph, washing their hands in innocence.’
Anders was one of a few thinkers in the 1950s and ‘60s who understood that the pervasiveness of computational technological logics have cultural, political, social, and foremost ethical consequences as they guide perspectives and possibilities for the future. Without articulating a materialist or object-oriented philosophy per se, Anders was nonetheless focused on the relationship between humans and their technological artefact that comes to constitute our social and political ecology. That is to say, Anders was examining more closely the appearance of our apparatuses, so to speak, to understand the maxims and logics implicit in the technologies and how these, in turn, shape our humanity, or as he might say, our soul.
His magnum opus, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, now beautifully translated into English as The Obsolescence of the Human, offers a trove of insights and observations relevant to our present AI moment. The most obvious, perhaps, is his sharp and unflinching assessment of our shifting relationship with technology, especially the hierarchical transformation in our own self-understanding as humans in a technological ecology, which gives rise to what Anders names Promethean Shame. Promethean shame denotes an uneasy relationship between humans and the products we make, a ‘confusion of creator and creation’ by which we increasingly come to revere the qualities of the creations, the products, the artefacts, and in doing so, the fact that humans are not products of our own creation becomes a marker of shame, of inferiority. In this distinctly modern condition which finds its origins in the entwinement of human and machine labour from the industrial revolution onward, the modern human comes to measure her worth, and general (moral) standards, by the flawless and perfectible functionalities of machines, all the while realising that, despite being a producer, she cannot herself fully be a product, never fully live up to the strength, speed, scale, precision and improvability of her creations, and thus never fully fit into the normed environment that is shaped and determined by ever-accelerating technological systems. The human as the weakest link in a human-made technological universe. It is perhaps this shameful condition that provided the motivation to create ‘a thinking machine’ in the first place.
The problem, here, for Anders, is not that humans have created a world of artifice. Indeed, he is keenly aware that humans always rely on artifice for survival. The problem is that in the modern technological environment we make products that are not measured on the basis of human needs but rather exceed them. This excess creates a setting in which the dominant technological logics become a baseline against which we come to measure ourselves, which, in turn, shapes (and limits) how we might act and imagine the world otherwise. We align ourselves with the logic, capacities, and potential of the technologies we create, and in doing so we increasingly render ourselves worth less than our creations.
It is all too evident how this maps onto the present AI era in which ever-greater realms of human activity are routed through the frictionless functioning of data processing systems – from summarising to creating texts and images, to determining job application outcomes, to acting as a therapist, to writing law, to making life and death decisions. Growing swathes of life are routed through the core parameters (values) of speed, scale, and efficiency. Never a match for the cognitive speed, the potential for scale in output or the radical optimisation mandate of AI systems, we, as humans, are making ourselves obsolete. This obsolescence is not felt so much by the actual or material disappearance of humans as such, but as an erosion of the human-qua-human and an alignment with the techno-logical processes of our latest technologies; a philosophical obsolescence. In an expanding ecology of technological products, we become what he calls mit-maschinell – co-machinistic. And in becoming co-machinistic, we seem archaic in our human capacities, specifically in the capacity to relate to our actions and take responsibility for them. It is precisely because humans are intrinsically un-made and reliant on technological enhancement and artifice in the widest sense, that Anders’ work offers a perspective that repeatedly brings us back to the pivotal question: what shall we become, as humans? Or rather, what shall become of us, as humans in a world in which ‘powerful AI’ is hoped to be ‘smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields’ and can ‘prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult code base from scratch’ and so on, as Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei suggests.
This condition, where we are so shamefully embedded within an ever-expanding technological product universe, outpaces and outgrows our ability to imagine the consequences of our actions within such a product universe. It opens a chasm between production (Herstellung) and imagination (Vorstellung). Related to Promethean shame, Anders names this the ‘Promethean gradient’ or ‘Promethean gap’ (das prometheische Gefälle). It is the condition that curtails the ability to ‘feel’ responsibility for technologically mediated and facilitated actions. The greater the effects of the technology, the more our ability to understand the meaning of the effects shrinks.
Crucially, though, Anders’ analysis does not fall into the trap of technological determinism. That is to say, he was as much a critic of technology as he was a critic of humans complying with a technological artifice of their own making. At no point in his sharp body of work does he let the human off the hook (including himself), implying, perhaps in a tacitly Arendtian manner, that other, new beginnings are always possible, even in challenging circumstances. This meticulous reflexivity is felt across all of Anders’ texts but perhaps most keenly in his open letter to Klaus Eichmann, son of Nazi prison guard Adolf Eichmann. The letter is a clear demonstration of Anders’ method of thought, always interrogating that which he has just demonstrated, digging ever-more deeply into the matter at hand until there is no way out but to stare an uncomfortable fact right in the face. The text is also an elegant and utterly devastating illustration of the very real consequences of when Promethean shame and the Promethean gap are exploited in the context of conflict and war.
The letter was penned in 1964 and was published under the title Wir Eichmannsöhne (We, sons of Eichmann). As I discuss elsewhere, the text is Anders’ examination of the foundations of ‘the Monstrous’ (das Monströse), by which he means the genocidal acts of violence committed against humans, with a factory-like industriousness, as though killing was simply another process of production. It also examines the fact that this atrocity was enabled by either the complicity or ignorance of not one ‘Eichmann’ but many. It is only by examining the roots of the monstrous that we stand a chance of realising that our present technological stance may well lead us to repeat the darkest acts of humankind. To say it differently, for Anders, the horrors of Nazi Germany, the concentration camps and the possibility of large scale violence are not only a matter of political ideology; they have deep socio-political-cultural roots which are intrinsically tethered to modern technologies. A full analysis of the very rich text exceeds the scope of this short essay. Nonetheless, it is worth briefly exploring a key theme in Anders’ letter: the interplay of power, technology, and totalitarianism.
After the genocidal atrocities of the Nazi regime, where advanced technologies facilitated the industrial elimination of humans, and especially after the use of the atomic bomb by the U.S., a weapon so absurdly destructive that it could theoretically spell the end of all humankind, Anders was sharply critical of thoughtlessly twinning technological advancements with notions of progress. Indeed, he thought it would be utterly naïve to think that human enlightenment automatically grows with increased levels of technological advancement:
Anyone who still holds out hope for such a development today is not only superstitious, but has also fallen victim to those who currently hold power: the shadowy figures of the technological age in whose interest it is to keep us in the dark about the darkening of our world, in fact, in whose interest it is to ceaselessly create this darkness.
The more we are functionally and culturally woven into an environment in which technological logics dominate, the more we are thrust into a state of non-knowledge about the effects of that within which we function, as elements of a growing techno-logical universe. A crucial aspect of this dynamic is the expansion of the technological system, so that everything and everyone is drawn into the wake of technical utility and functionality until the ambition to turn the whole globe into a useful resource for the system is complete. At stake is the very transformation of the world. And precisely herein reside the roots of the monstrous, as Anders notes, namely, in ‘the fact that the whole world today is transforming into a machine.’
The totalistic ambition of the AI industry to bring everything and everyone in line with an ever-expanding AI enterprise might be interpreted as the realisation of this world-as-machine. Whether it is energy or water resources that must be made available to feed AI data centres or whether it is all of our data being fed into large language model training, the AI industry’s appetite for accumulation, as Anders would put it, is insatiable. Meanwhile, a growing strata of human society becomes enrolled in this technologically-shaped world, at first reluctantly, then for convenience, then enthusiastically, encouraged by light-hearted chats with Claude, Bard, or ChatGPT, or some other anthropomorphised large language model. To remain on the outside of this expansionistic and increasingly totalising AI ecology, indeed to resist it, becomes harder, more cumbersome, and increasingly impossible, as unfathomable amounts of money and resources flow into this single-focus technological enterprise.
It is, as Anders notes in his letter, a fundamental contest not merely against the hitherto existing world, but for the world – its resources, its materials, its inhabitants and its values. In such a world we might ‘be forced into the role of machine-parts, raw materials or virtual waste’ or indeed we might ‘be urged to reduce our fellow humans to such roles.’ When humans become little more than elements of a technological system, ‘the millenarian empire of technological totalitarianism will be fulfilled,’ Anders diagnoses. At this time, we will have liquidated ourselves. And this, he notes, is not only the foundation for the philosophical liquidation of the human, it also opens the way toward the physical liquidation of what Arendt in her analysis of totalitarian systems called ‘superfluous’ humans. Totalitarianism, Arendt writes, ‘strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous.’
Although Anders was very clear that, at the time of his writing, this technological totalitarianism had not yet materialized, he was emphatic that, unless we resist the encroaching technological dark age, a shadowy realm of ignorance, we must reckon with the possibility that the horrors of the coming technological empire will eclipse those of the totalitarian system of the past.
‘Do you notice something, Klaus Eichmann?’ Anders writes. ‘Do you notice that the so-called Eichmann problem is not a problem of the past? […] That we are all also sons of Eichmann, or at the very least sons of an Eichmann world?’ Anders’ letter to Klaus Eichmann is an address to us all; his message for Eichmann is also a prognosis for us. A monstrous future may be opening up in which some of us might become oblivious co-machinistic handmaidens of totalitarian violence, and others victims of a totalizing machine.
All translations of the Wir Eichmannsöhne quotations are my own.
