Preprint: „Artificial Intelligence as a Hybrid Life Form. On the Critique of Cybernetic Expansion“ by Prof. Dr. Jörn Lamla
Artificial intelligence (AI) challenges human intelligence and our humanistic self-conception. This contribution argues that this is happening for good reasons but is based on a mistaken opposition that falls short. Human beings and technology have always been intertwined in hybrid forms of life. Yet the exact nature of this hybridity is misunderstood when inadequate dichotomies of human subject and technical object are replaced by a totalizing conception of a cybernetic informational universe that reduces all that exists to this latter, single point of comparison. Representing the paradigm of digital society, AI is a bearer and expression of such a cybernetic expansion that both anchors digital analogism in society as a closed system of interpreting the world, or a cosmology, and renders it plausible at the level of knowledge. AI thus deepens and generalizes conventions and functional patterns of justification that have a long history in industrial society. The thesis proposed here is that, to counter this expansive dynamic effectively and critically, more needs to be done than evoke humanistic values. What we need is a better understanding of the ontological heterogeneity of the societal modes of existence that are assembled in hybrid forms of life.