#Anders#CritiqueOfTechnology#PhilosophyOfTechnology: "The critique of technology developed by Anders took shape as a humanist (and Marxist) Aufhebung of Heidegger’s thought, not as its pure and simple negation. The Heideggerian vision of technology as the true ontological condition of men in the modern world[37] finds an undeniable correspondence in the work of Anders. In Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, technology is perceived systematically and exclusively as a source of alienation, never appearing – like in Fourier, Marx, or Benjamin – as a possible ‘key to happiness’ for humanity.[38] Heidegger’s observation according to which ‘everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology[39] could readily have been written by his former pupil.
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Anders’s distinctive philosophy was the result of a synthesis of two formative elements: a critique of technical and industrial modernity with a romantic savour, inspired by Heidegger but remodelled by a strong ethical-political sensibility, and a Marxist critique of capitalism conceived as a system of domination and alienation. Modern civilisation did not limit itself, as in the past, to excluding the Jews; it made them the designated victims of its technology of death. This sombre reflection on modernity as a catastrophe without redemption reveals the traces left on Anders’s thought by a certain Jewish tradition and gives his theses a ‘prophetic’ character. As Gershom Scholem wrote, ‘the authors of the Apocalypse always had a pessimistic view of the world. History, in their eyes, deserved only to perish’.[58] For Anders, however, as distinct from prophets of the Apocalypse, Auschwitz and Hiroshima did not seem to announce any salvation, rather the end of messianic hope. His own apocalypse had lost any eschatological dimension. All that remained was to live ‘without hope’.[59]"
Today, the view that artificial intelligence poses some kind of threat is no longer a minority position among those working on it. There are different opinions on which risks we should be most worried about, but many prominent researchers, from Timnit Gebru to Geoffrey Hinton – both ex-Google computer scientists – share the basic view that the technology can be toxic. Weizenbaum’s pessimism made him a lonely figure among computer scientists during the last three decades of his life; he would be less lonely in 2023.
There is so much in Weizenbaum’s thinking that is urgently relevant now. Perhaps his most fundamental heresy was the belief that the computer revolution, which Weizenbaum not only lived through but centrally participated in, was actually a counter-revolution. It strengthened repressive power structures instead of upending them. It constricted rather than enlarged our humanity, prompting people to think of themselves as little more than machines. By ceding so many decisions to computers, he thought, we had created a world that was more unequal and less rational, in which the richness of human reason had been flattened into the senseless routines of code.
Weizenbaum liked to say that every person is the product of a particular history. His ideas bear the imprint of his own particular history, which was shaped above all by the atrocities of the 20th century and the demands of his personal demons. Computers came naturally to him. The hard part, he said, was life."