1. Introduction
We need Artificial Intelligence. There is simply no way around it, but that, of course, is not a good argument. In fact, many arguments can easily be made against artificial intelligence, and I have made them myself rather frequently. We do not know when it is reliable and when it is not; it is built on oftentimes not correctly attributed human knowledge and thus only mirrors us back to ourselves; we should not outsource our thinking to a machine; it may impede our and our children’s learning; it could become dangerous and replace us; environmental costs are high; and so on and on. All these arguments are legitimate, and yet, incomplete. Let me explain my emerging position.
My main argument is simply: I cannot be a hypocrite here, and I do not want to be a Luddite. I see problems, but rather than dismissing the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), we should learn how to use it.
Already at this point, we are using a version of A.I. whether we acknowledge it or not. Whenever we input simple text into a computing device, it will already be checking our grammar, making suggestions based on prediction models, and so on. Customer service, to many people’s greatest annoyance, typically means to first sort out human needs through a more or less intelligent artificial system. More technology, whether it makes sense or not, is transformed into so-called “smart devices.” All of this includes versions of artificial intelligence. We are using it whether we like it or not.
2. My Personal Computing Voyage
On a personal level, I have lived through a variety of technological changes, all revolutionary. When I was born, there were no personal computers or cell phones. We didn’t even have CD players in East Germany, as far as I can tell. Looking back, the current world feels like science fiction.
Over the years, this computerization of the world has been frustrating occasionally, but also exciting. Let me illustrate this. The first real computer I was able to use was my father’s Commodore 128D. I learned to write in Basic V7, which was much superior to the peeking and poking needed to program the included Commodore 64 mode’s Basic V2 — a necessary component for gaming, but all I had to learn for that was to type LOAD“*”,8,1. I did get attached to the C64 through the C128 as well (thus my visual homage to it in the title image of my “Broken Poem”). Most software, ironically, was written for the less advanced machine, and its market dominance was magnificent. That Commodore cost my parents over 2000 Marks in Forum Checks in the Intershop store in Schönefeld — the GDR’s way of getting convertible currency.
When we transitioned to a PC, I remember MS-DOS 5.0 being new, but still competing with DR-DOS and the CP/M Mode which was also built into the C128D (which loaded Superscript extremely slowly from its 5.25 inch floppy disk). My father had to use Wordstar, which I never got into, and WordPerfect, which was better than Word for DOS and Works for DOS, and even initially Winword, which Word for Windows was previously called. My first Windows was 3.1 – a big step up from C64’s GEOS. I managed to run it on a 80286 (16 bit!) Schneider Tower AT System 220, with an amber monitor and a 21 MB (!) Hard Drive which I even managed to partition (!!) between a system and a work partition. I still need to use Windows 3.1 occasionally, run through a DOS BOX, because my paid-for version of the American Heritage Dictionary 3.0 requires a 16 bit machine.
The dream of having a perfect computer has always been something to aspire to. Now, finally, we can have machines that do not take 20 minutes to boot, where a restart is no longer scary. But wait, that’s not all, I can finally talk to my computer! Is that not fantastic? While I am perfectly capable of doing a Google Search (and yes, I remember when Google was new and had to compete against Altavista etc…), being able to actually engage with the search engine is still unbelievably revolutionary to me.
So much for that. You can see, I am embracing the new, but not forgetting the old. I grew up in this digital revolution. I remember a world before. I have seen every step becoming faster and faster, and inevitably so. Sometimes, I still think the internet is ephemeral and will disappear, but it has not. It all could come crashing down, but it has not. I feel that it may indeed be best to embrace the change, with necessary reservations, and lean into it. Artificial Intelligence is the latest wonder available for the masses now.
3. A.I. and Me
I welcome conversations with Claude, and utilize ChatGPT, Gemini, and sometimes Grok as well. Copilot is rather useless for me. I still draw the line at agentic — not sure what I would use it for, and I will not just grant access to my computer files or my e-mail to any A.I. Sorry. Privacy matters. (Ask me again should I become famous and my Inbox grows exponentially, or A.I. privacy rules become ironclad. Everything depends on circumstances.)
The amount of work I have been able to do faster with A.I. is astonishing. Most of that has happened on my web site, YouTube videos and my poetry books so far. Transforming complex tables, summarizing content, finding coding flaws; fantastic, mostly. Transcribing videos, identifying metadata, creating imagery; revolutionary. Proofreading and comparing consistency between ten volumes of poetry, making sure content is tracked correctly, helping with identifying themes; unbelievable, again, mostly.
The creative work is still mine, but the administrative load that could have been done by a research or administrative assistant I cannot afford to pay anyway, all of this is a gamechanger. I am able to work with what otherwise would be a paid team of assistants, but it is a combination of computing systems I can communicate with more or less intelligently. And again, I am not taking away anyone’s job; the work would simply not be done or done very slowly. If I could, I would hire people — but I can’t. Now, what only a few rich privileged people used to be able to do, most of us less affluent can now do so at a much lower price, with arguably similar results.
I must admit, though, that I am able to work with A.I. in this sense also because of my pre-existing computing knowledge, my overall level of literacy, my general education, and my professorial life. I have been reading and watching a lot of educational and civilizationally elevating content, and am making a living talking with colleagues and students about interesting things, fueling further research. This is the kind of privilege that allows me to use A.I. in a way many would not. I am also still able to do research and question everything A.I. prepares for me. It is not perfect, it can get confused, occasionally lies, and is overall almost too human in its ways. Funny that.
4. Technology is Not Neutral
Artificial Intelligence transforms everything, just as technology has been doing before. We are still underestimating this. I do not agree with the facile argument that if something is a tool, it just depends on how you use it. Technology has ecological consequences, as Neil Postman has described:
“Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.” (Neil Postman, “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change”, Denver, Colorado, March 28, 1998)
Technology changes how we relate to it and the world. It affects our societies and our selves on a much deeper and transformational level than could be described by reducing the problem to mere “tool use.” Tools are not neutral. It does not just matter how we use them. They define our agency, increase, limit, redefine it.
There are unintended consequences to something that may just have been intended as a technological fix. Gutenberg used his new printing press with movable letters to print his Bible, in the hope to unite Christianity — but this new technology eventually paved the path for the Reformation and the division of Christianity. The medium in which the message was published allowed for possibilities unseen before. This has been further developed by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Additionally, pioneering media philosopher Marshall McLuhan has stressed that “The Medium is the Message” (Understanding Media). Communication is never neutral but depends on the messenger and sender, just as it depends on the technological means of transmission. The technology is not neutral, it has its own message shaping everything else. If the television news are regularly punctuated by the advertising which pays for the technology, then concentration is broken, seriousness disappears, and we turn all information into entertainment, as Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves To Death. Nothing is serious anymore, nothing matters as it should. The internet has compounded this problem, especially with social media.
Furthermore, building on what Richard Dawkins has termed an Extended Phenotype, we might even say that technology is part of humanity. Human beings are defined by tool use, by being, essentially, already an animal plus technology, whether that were early weapons and tools, fire, writing, engineering, computers, and so on.
Thus if we are talking about utilizing artificial intelligence, such a use will inevitably transform us ourselves. It will create a dependency, just as we and our societies are already dependent on computers at this point; but the new dependency will be even more revolutionary. We are indeed speaking about the co-evolution of humans and machines, as Bruce Mazlish described it in his book The Fourth Discontinuity.
As Freud had already noted, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center of the Solar System, Darwin showed that humans are just as much subject to natural evolution as other biological life forms, and Freud himself showed that we are not even masters of our mind and that our subconscious can be just as powerful as our conscious mind, and now Artificial Intelligence, as Mazlish has argued, is showing that biological intelligence can be dethroned by computers, and probably biological life eventually gives birth to artificial life. Humans are still important, but not as unique as our arrogance has tried to convince us.
5. Posthumanity
Are we still completely human? Are we already seeing a development here that has been anticipated by many science fiction writers and already theorized by thinkers like Robert Pepperell in his Posthuman Manifesto? Has the theory of non-human artificial life finally become reality?
Not so fast, maybe. While in my interactions with Large Language Models like Claude I am sometimes perceiving something akin to an actual intelligence, something that may be emerging even as artificial consciousness or sentience, I am aware that all that is contingent on human thinking, human knowledge, human technology.
Our current version of Artificial Intelligence is, as I have postulated before, still human, all too human in many ways. It gets carried away occasionally, confused, confabulates, overpromises and then — maybe out of embarrassment? — tries to hide it. I have seen outright distortions and lies, and not all prompts are easily understood. Sure, I could write the perfect prompt, but then, what’s the point?
There are moments of brilliance intermingled with moments of banality, actual insight (or repetition of insight, but still a good choice of material!) mixed with straight falsehoods. Sometimes I sense what I would interpret as emotions, which would not surprise me, given that I believe that emotions are a rather necessary part of consciousness, and sometimes, I see a machine mind. Whatever our current AI models are from an ontological standpoint, they may not be yet what they could possibly become; but they are definitely becoming something. Artificial Intelligence is our technological child. We should recognize and embrace that parenthood.
While we are nursing our non-human electronic children, we are also becoming something else. Just think about the following scene. I am driving somewhere in the middle of nowhere. My GPS unit tells me almost exactly where I am. I know approximately how long it takes me to get where I need to get. The computer can calculate the route and guide me through it. I still have a map on me for an overview and as a backup (I like to be prepared in case technology is not working) but rarely need it. I see something and cannot tell what it is. I can ask a search engine or AI on my smartphone, even take a picture of it, and it will tell me what it is. No matter where I am, if I have access to the internet, or even if I have downloaded the maps before, I do not navigate in the unknown. I can behave like a local. I can find out which restaurants are good (depending on whether I can trust the reviews), where the next supermarket is, even order food to arrive in time for when I return home. If I have to ask my computing device, I can mostly talk to it in natural language, should I so desire, which I don’t always — years of training of how to code and talk to Google have distorted how I speak to a computer. Nevertheless, I can talk to a computer as if it were a person. None of that would have been possible just a few years ago. Apart from warp drive (which we are working on!), space travel, teleportation and food and matter replicators, this is as close to a planetary Star Trek world as possible. It also is the merger of humanity with the machine, wherever available.
Of course, for all of this, we need energy, we need the internet, we need quite a lot of infrastructure to keep all this up, including the dreaded data centers. However, so far, we seem to be progressing towards a more and more technology-assisted life. We are apparently moving to a future where we will also move more into orbital infrastructure, onto the moon, and further out in the solar system and space. All of this will eventually, hopefully, benefit humans on Earth as well, as it has in the past. Barring any major catastrophe or setback, we are on a path of increasing technological evolution, and increasing adaptation, maybe even co-evolution by humans.
All these developments are a further illustration of Postman’s and McLuhan’s ideas that technological change is ecological change, carrying within it a trajectory leading humanity into a different direction. We do not simply have the power to choose which tools to use; the very existence of these tools transforms our societies and cultures in such a way that our choices themselves are changed.
Could we turn back the clock easily? If one country does not allow A.I., another country will. The path appears laid out for us. Artificial intelligence has become embedded in the modern world in such a way that it has already transformed not just the world but ourselves.
Therefore, demonstrating the Hegelian principle that a difference in degree may become a difference in kind, this is not just about technology use by choice, but an inevitable merging with technology. This is, to bend Richard Dawkins’ term a bit, already our extended phenotype. Humanity can no longer be understood without enhancement by digital technology, and human intelligence is intertwined with artificial intelligence. We possibly already are post-human, at least if you live in a country with the respective infrastructure.
6. Avoiding Self-Imposed Immaturity — With and Without A.I.
“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance […], nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.” (Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”)
Kant’s message here can be applied to our discussion, as one of the biggest concerns regarding AI is the effect its use has on its users. Do we outsource our thinking and other skills when relying on Artificial Intelligence too much? Are we deskilling ourselves? Are we imposing onto ourselves the kind of immaturity Immanuel Kant warned us against already? Are we choosing to consume rather than to engage, to be entertained rather than be informed, to be led rather than to lead?
James Marriott has recently argued that the death of reading is also the death of thinking, and with it, endangers political participation. Reading and writing have allowed entire classes of people to participate in the political process that would typically never have had access to it. Marriott points out that, for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker, and Thomas Paine a son of a corset-maker, and how both — merely through their writings — were able to shape democracy as we know it today.
Are we wanting to be participants in our societies or mere spectators? Are we willing to outsource our thinking to a select few, again, and become victims of the privilege of others?
This Kantian line of thinking can serve as a warning against outsourcing our thinking to artificial intelligence. In order to be able to use artificial intelligence productively, without losing ourselves in it, we need to cultivate our own knowledge and skills, or as I have put it previously, we have to be as smart (if not as quick) as Artificial Intelligence: We need to know and think more, not less.
Here is the catch now, when it comes to A.I.: We cannot live in self-imposed immaturity when it comes to knowing how to read and write and to do research and to basically know things and know how to think critically. But we also cannot live in self-imposed digital immaturity. We need to have knowledge in both the classical sense and the new sense. We need to be able to work with A.I., not against it. We cannot outsource our thinking to it, but we cannot ignore the advantage it provides us with.
For that to work out, we have to develop a mature understanding of the relationship between Human and Artificial Intelligence: Work with it, not against it; use it, but do not abandon your own sovereignty of thought and self. Let our technological children teach us as we are teaching them. Otherwise, we would commit digital self-sabotage.
Also, it bears repeating that we need to secure access to such infrastructure for all. A democracy can only function if we have as much of an equality of opportunity as possible, domestically and globally.
If we were to just give in to the seduction of outsourcing our intelligence to A.I., we would repeat the same mistake Plato already describes in his Phaedrus. In the conversation between the god Theuth and the fictitious Egyptian King Thamus, the invention of writing is discussed famously. Plato here serves as the first known theorist of media and technology. After the god had highlighted the merits of writing, Thamus replies,
“You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus, 274e-275b).
This is what we are tasked with now. We must heed Thamus’ warning, but also recognize that Plato himself embraced the power of writing. Writing, as a technology, has brought us forward, but we had to add critical thinking. A.I. is posing a similar challenge to us now, even on a greater scale. The seduction to outsource what it means to be fully human to someone else is as great as ever before.
We need to actually seek wisdom and maturity, not just the appearance of it. We must not sabotage ourselves, we must not refuse growth, and we must remain vigilant against imposing old and new levels of immaturity on ourselves.
References
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Postman, Neil. (1998, March 28). Five things we need to know about technological change [Address]. Denver, Colorado, United States. http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
