Collage with mirrors reflecting diverse human figures, symbolising AI data's human origin and the 'human in the loop' concept.

You should, as they say, “follow the money” when people make pronouncements. And when they’re confusing, grand-sounding, and vague, full of big words that point to a radically different future, I’d argue that you should be wary. I’ve re-read this interview with Tobias Rees several times, and I’ve concluded that what he’s saying is… bollocks.

Rees is a “founder of… an R&D studio located at the intersection of philosophy, art and technology” while also being “a senior fellow of Schmidt Sciences’ AI2050 initiative and a senior visiting fellow at Google.” Oh, and he’s a former editor of NOEMA, where this interview is published. While some of what he says sounds relatively believable, I just can’t get over this statement:

What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.

The idea that AI is a “profound philosophical event” should start your eyes rolling, and I’d be surprised if they haven’t rolled out of your head by the time you finish the next bit:

The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold.

That that means is that an epoch that was stable for almost 400 years comes — or appears to come — to an end.

Poetically put, it is a bit as if AI releases ourselves and the world from the understanding of ourselves and the world we had. It leaves us in the open.

In general, when people start arbitrarily dividing history into epochs (think “second industrial revolution,” etc.) they usually don’t know what they’re talking about. Rees manages to mention a bunch of philosophers (Karl Jaspers, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, etc.) but it’s a scatter-gun approach. Again, I don’t really think he knows what he’s talking about:

The alternative to being against AI is to enter AI and try to show what it could be. We need more in-between people. If my suggestion that AI is an epochal rupture is only modestly accurate, then I don’t really see what the alternative is.

What does this mean? And then, table-flipping time:

As we have elaborated in this conversation, we live in philosophically discontinuous times. The world has been outgrowing the concepts we have lived by for some time now.

We only live in “philosophically discontinuous times” if you haven’t been paying attention, and haven’t done your homework. Another reason to avoid techbro-adjacent philosophising. It’s just a waste of time.

Source: NOEMA magazine

Image: CC-BYAnne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Data is a Mirror of Us /