AI and the Missing Mother
The misery of the unborn being.
There are a few quotations that come up frequently in my work. One is from the twentieth-century German philosopher Günther Anders:
Human beings are ashamed to have been born instead of made.
It expresses Anders’s idea of Promethean shame: modern humans’ sense that their fleshy, mortal, meatspace selves are inferior to the beautifully designed and constructed machines they build. Machines are predictable and efficient; they operate in a rational manner. Humans are sloppy and erratic; their behavior is twisted by passion and emotion.
Promethean shame runs as an undercurrent through the triumphalist rhetoric of the technocracy, whether the subject is virtuality, transhumanism, or artificial intelligence. When the time comes to place a tombstone on Silicon Valley’s grave, Anders’s words should be carved deeply into its face.
Katherine Dee, in a recent post considering the possibility of an autonomous AI, allude…