When Philosophy Becomes Cybernetics
With artificial intelligence, such as Open AI and ChatGPT, the central focus of much debate and speculation, understanding the technology’s place within society is necessary. Is artificial intelligence simply a tool within human control?
When interviewing for the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1966, twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger claims that modern technology is no longer a tool. It is rather a way of thinking and interacting with the world. To understand the origin of technology, a good example is depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when, at the dawn of time, early homo erectus views a stick as a club, to be used as a tool for the killing of food. Technology, as a tool, defines generations of life on earth. But Heidegger suggests something has changed today with technology in the modern world.
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger says he was frightened when pictures of the moon came back to Earth or when the atomic bomb was dropped. Due to the grasp technology has upon the Western world, Heidegger postulates that philosophy has come to the end of its life. In the place of philosophy Heidegger finds cybernetics. By this term Heidegger means the rise of machines and control systems. Basically, by cybernetics, Heidegger is stating technology is something new and no longer simply a tool for the achievement of certain goals.
Modern technologies, especially artificial intelligence, change the way we think. The role of philosophy, by Heidegger’s logic, is limited by this change. Philosophy is no longer meant to question and to think through what is most essential to society and the human-being. The focus of life is to propel technology forward and not to question the basis for why we are doing so. In essence, philosophy has been overtaken by the sciences, which reinforces cybernetics.
This interview is quite famous due to Heidegger’s profound statement that “only a god can save us now.” That is certainly an outlandish answer to the question about what to do amid technology. What this quote means is that the conventional questions of philosophy—“What is the good-life?”; “What is justice?”; “What is knowledge?”; “What does it mean to be moral?”—are superseded by the priority of the sciences in the technological age. Saying that only a god can save us is to signal that the answer of what to do is outside of human control. Slipping away from us is our own humanity and ability to address moral and social questions. But how can this be so?
In another piece, 1954’s The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger concludes by stating that questioning is the “piety of thinking”. Again, we see a religious reference. We can interpret this as follows: the highest priority, or the closest to the divine, the human being can achieve is to keep oneself open to other ways of living besides technological ones. Easier said than done, Heidegger!
This piety in thought is enveloped in a questioning of the moral and economic tenets of society. Heidegger himself actually lived according to this questioning by spending much of his time in a remote hut in the Black Forest, far from civilization’s grasp.
Indeed, “only a god can save us now” and “the piety of thought” are connected through the same criticism of technology. By stating that philosophy becomes cybernetics, Heidegger is arguing that the process of thinking, integral to philosophy since the time of Socrates’ questioning the people of Athens, is disrupted. In the technological age, we no longer have the full capacity to question. And yet this capacity, Heidegger claims, is essential for the human experience. How can we make sense of this lack of questioning?
In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger calls the essence of technology a framing. The German word he uses, Ge-stell, has a difficult time being translated into English. For example, we can think of a bike frame, a picture frame, or the innocent bystander as framed in a murder. Heidegger wants us to think at the crossroads of all three examples. He wants us to think of a frame that distorts the true view of a picture when it is framed or of the partial viewing of the bike through its frame.
This framing is what restricts the human’s ability to think within conventional philosophy. Human thinking, with the rise of technology, has a picture-frame imposed around it, not a clear or transparent one, but a dirty, dusty, and cracked one. This frame obscures the picture. How we see the world is through this unclear picture-frame. With the increased presence of technology around us, instead of seeing the world clearly, Heidegger claims our ability to see the world becomes, in a sense, opaque.
We can counter Heidegger by saying that certainly technology provides clarity in many facets in life as well. One has to look no further than at medicines that treat diseases, insecticides that allow farmers to retain crop yield, smartphones that connect each corner of the globe, mechanized agriculture that procures mass food production, and even things we take for granted, such as indoor plumbing or refrigeration. No one would deny that these are a net benefit for humanity.
But to argue in terms of benefitting is to miss the nuance of Heidegger. Heidegger uses the example of a weathervane versus a complex radar station to illustrate his point. Both show the weather. The weathervane is a simple invention at the mercy of the wind. The radar station provides a reading of the weather that is much more sophisticated but that reveals to us a picture of the world the weathervane does not. Due to the framing, our thinking is impacted by more complex technologies than previously.
Our thinking is what is impacted, for instance, by relying too much on smartphones or artificial intelligence. By overly relying on technology, we are framed in how the world appears to us. Heidegger is not a Luddite, a nineteenth-century term derived during the Industrial Revolution, for people who would intentionally break factory machinery. Rather, Heidegger is a protector of thought. Drawing attention to the possibility that we are entering the domain for which we could lose our human ability to think, is his greatest philosophical legacy.
Further Reading
Heidegger, Martin. “Only a God Can Save Us” in Richard Wolin’s The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row Publishing, 2013.
Is it better to exist than not to exist? Is it right to create life? These two questions, of considerable philosophical gravity, are connected. Depending on one’s answer, entirely different world-views follow. The questions are tricky though, and not like many other philosophical questions. In fact, some may challenge how sensible it is to form those questions in that way, in the first place.