Keynote at BSP26

I’m going to be speaking this week at the BSP Annual Conference at the University of Sussex. The conference is titled ‘Heidegger Fifty Years On: Can a God Still Save Us?’ and seeks to mark fifty years since Heidegger’s death. My paper is entitled ‘Idle Talk: Dasein and the Inauthentic Machine’, and this is my abstract:

The release of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has been controversial on multiple levels. It raises fundamental political, economic, environmental and moral challenges. Intersecting these concerns is a troubling lack of consensus over exactly what this novel technology is. For some it puts us on the verge of so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), for others it is an interesting but flawed tech demo. For one set of critics, it threatens our jobs through its ability to automate mundane tasks; for another, it threatens nothing less than the end of human civilisation. That this technology is experienced simultaneously as useless toy, helpful tool and existential threat indicates a failure to truly grasp its nature. I wish to demonstrate that this profound ambivalence and ambiguity around the nature of this technology results from a failure to ask the correct question. We should not ask what GAI is, but who?

In Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that Dasein must always be referred to by a personal pronoun. It is a who, not a what. And while I fundamentally reject any suggestion that GAI or even the sought-after AGI is or could be ‘sentient’, when adopting the typical Cartesian framing of these discussions, categorial interpretation — i.e. seeing GAI as a mere thing, present-at-hand — will not tell us anything we do not already assume. GAI is a statistical image of Dasein, and while an image of Dasein is not Dasein, neither is it a mere thing. Indeed, we need little experience in using GAI tools to recognise the peculiar ambiguity that they are neither ready-to-hand nor un-ready-to-hand: oscillating between handy and obstructive. Ambiguity is at the core of our experience of these tools, and nothing less than an existential interpretation of GAI, of which this talk will offer a sketch, will offer a chance to understand the being of this new machine. I will argue that GAI is an image of the they-self: Dasein in its most public, most levelled-down and least authentic.

The paper is available here and the slides here on Adobe Express and here as a PDF