The Future of AI. Extinction or Death of the Human?

Abstract

On March 30^th, 2023, the CAIS released a statement warning against the danger of human extinction by the ‘hands’ of AI. By reclaiming the phenomenological centrality of death for human existence, I argue that this statement allows for an ontological diagnosis of both the human posture before the emergent progress of AI and the nature of this technology. To develop this diagnosis, I address three questions: What is the human? What is AI? What is the nature of the threat that AI poses to humanity? By drawing from Cassirer, Heidegger, Jankélévitch, and Landsberg, I firstly consider the human as animal symbolicum moritūrus and argue that the symbolic encounter with dead loved Thou represents a phenomenon of genuine human individuation. In following Dupuy, I then identify the core ontological feature of AI with model making and show how, in time, the model has taken ontological precedence over phenomenal. Lastly, I explain how the threat posed by AI coincides with the modeling abstraction of the animal symbolicum moritūrus into a dephysicalized inforg. Here, I maintain that the digitalized existence instantiated by AI coincides with an ontological shift: life reduced to an enhanced computational synthesis of matrixes is tantamount to an existence insolubly diverging from human life. AI progress is now forcing humanity to readdress the scandal that lays at the core of existence: not the extermination brought about by a Skynet-type AI, but the overt presence of a personalized death. What is the future going to look like? It is hard to tell, but I suggest that what awaits humanity is a grim fate were death not to take back its due ontological right.