AI in This World and the Next

Abstract

As the symptoms of our self-inflicted planetary emergency become ever more alarming, hope seems to be growing that AI technologies can make our capitalist way of life more sustainable. Some even believe that machine intelligence will avert impending catastrophe more or less by itself. But the evidence of history should caution us against such heady Promethean optimism. Millennia of human experience suggest that only radical systemic change can halt our perilous trajectory. AI interventions and other such modern techno-fixes will simply not be enough.

An exciting new theoretical paradigm in the humanities and social sciences can help us grasp the full urgency of this message from history. Briefly stated, it recasts reality itself as a variable relational effect, one that humans co-produce with non-humans in the course of their everyday life practices. And just as practices have varied widely over time and space, so life has come to be experienced in a “pluriverse” of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. An alternative pluriversal vision of history then allows us to identify striking correspondences between the sustainability of communities and their particular ways of “worlding.”

Most immediately, one can correlate the consistent sustainability of non-modern communities, past and present, with their commitment to living by a common set of metaphysical principles or “laws of being.” In stark contrast, the technoscientifc capitalist world of our own modernity, a world that current AI practices are hard-wired to perpetuate, directly violates all of these same tried-and-tested laws. The dire ecological consequences for the planet are now all too plain to see. It is vital that we learn lessons from the vast inventory of non-modern experiences and commit to re-engineering our way of worlding along more ecologically reponsible lines. Modified forms of AI can absolutely help us to realize a more livable future world in practice. But they cannot save us all by themselves.