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The Burnout Society
While this work does not address AI by name, it is a great entry point into Han's thinking. He is arguably one of the most influential, popular, and important current philosophers, writers, and social critics. AND, he is alive and actively writing and contributing to current thought.
Rather than living in a punishment society and panopticon as described in Foucault's work, Han expertly focuses the lens to reveal an excess positivity (as in the addition of things not the quality of something as a positive or negative experience), false freedom, false transparency, and how all this contributes to being an ""achievement society"". We are achievement subjects in our own individual projects of self, that digital capitalism, big tech and big data, and neoliberalism have reinforced, in particular through the internet, giving up of our data to big tech companies, and social media. He goes on to build on this idea in other important works that I would suggest be a part of this collection: ""The Crisis of Narration"", ""Psychopolitics"", and ""Infocracy"".
We are taking in more information than we can actually handle, which he has talked about or framed as also being in an ""Information Society"" rather than a ""Knowledge/Widsom Society."" We ""sell"" our stories and data rather than connect with people communally, via ritual ,via third spaces, via group projects and community organizations or places of worship, and instead must produce, achieve, and prove ourselves not just to others but ourselves. In this way, Han would suggest that AI, part of big data and the internet and this Information Age, enhancing productivity, and infiltrating our lives and the information presented to us, creates a false freedom that actually exploits it. Everything is tracked, and could be use to control and manipulate us.
He suggests the antidotes are to not participate in these systems or technologies to the extent that we can, to slow down, to be present with activities like gardening, community interaction, walking, contemplative time, and an active ""inactivity/passivity"" whereby we stop trying to ceaselessly respond to everyone and live rather than survive. Again, while Han does not write about AI specifically, he talks about the systems, structures, and phenomena beyond AI that threaten human flourishing and are already damaging it. AI talks about efficiency but also removes meaning whereby we might have less friction to find that book, article, or record we were looking for, the mystery or journey in trying to get something done that then gives us spontaneity and a real story and experience. In just getting anything you want delivered to your home, via suggested products from big tech and AI, or sponsored Ads on a social media platform, one does not have to venture into the world and actually connect with people and search to find something. This begs the question, is this living, much less, human flourishing? -
Snow Crash
Snow Crash explores the depth of what it means to be human in a technologically obsessed culture. Snow Crash is also credited with being the source of the Metaverse and anticipated things like techno-currency and the collapse of information and surveillance networks. -
SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World
Estes is one of the few theologians with optimism for AI. This book emphasizes how technologically enhancements can benefit even the church. This work was recently cited in an article in The Atlantic for pioneering engagement among evangelicals. -
Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Shop Class as Soulcraft argues that manual, skilled work (like fixing motorcycles) is intellectually rich and essential to human flourishing. Crawford is critical of the shift in modern work toward abstraction, and the separation of thinking from doing. In his view, deep satisfaction and important forms of knowledge come from engaging with the material world, exercising judgment, and seeing the tangible results of one’s labor.
This perspective is increasingly relevant in the context of AI, which accelerates the delegation of both white- and blue-collar tasks to inscrutable software systems. As AI takes over more cognitive work (analysis, writing, creativity, decision-making) as well as physical tasks, human beings are distanced not only from the work itself but from the embodied knowledge that such work develops and sustains. In other words, AI makes us dumber the more we use it.
Crawford’s emphasis on the unity of mind and body in skilled labor challenges the idea that intelligence can be cleanly separated from action. When AI assumes more of our planning, problem-solving, and perception, we risk dislocating ourselves from the very processes that build competence and agency. The more we outsource, the less we engage in feedback loops between thinking and doing. This atrophy of judgment, attention, and intuition may erode our sense of identity, responsibility, and satisfaction in work. -
Selves and Forms of Life in the Digital Age: A Philosophical Exploration of Apparatgeist
The importance of human articulation face to face in language in light of the philosophical history of Alan Turing and early sociological study of mobile technology -
Race After Technology
Early but convincing example of bias built into the fashioning of algorithms that exclude people of color. Human flourishing remains a challenge because AI will never be context independent no matter how extensive the LLM. Social bias remains so our participation must include an intentional focus on people on the margins. -
On Artificial and Post- artificial Texts: Machine Learning and the Reader’s Expectations of Literary and Non-literary Writing
The text shows what has been lost: The assumption written words are of human origin. Yet it also shows how this might be a chance to return to a reading without regard to origin. -
Man’s Search for Meaning
In times like these, we must not forget that human flourishing can occur not only alongside the growth of artificial intelligence, but also amid suffering and destitution. Frankl reminds us in his book how resilient the human spirit is in literally willing meaning in places where one may suspect it to be most elusive. In Man’s Search for Meaning, I hope the reader realizes the inspirational infinity that is ingrained in every human which, by all comparison, makes even artificial intelligence inconsequential. -
Man's Conquest of Space
This is an exceptional and short essay by Hannah Arendt that offers a way of thinking about the rise of AI and its consequences for human dignity. -
Leisure: The Basis of Culture
Ravaged by war and the collapse of previous norms, peacetime Germans struggled to understand a world that was turning West and embracing industry. Many believed consumerism and a bourgeois lifestyle could offer a path to national progress. Philosopher Josef Pieper believed otherwise, insisting that we work so as to have the restful freedom to dream, create, and connect spiritually with the world. Pieper's elegant answer to alienation then has so much to say in an era when technology is again promising liberation - but somehow, will end up again leaving us doing to dishes while it writes ever cheaper poetry.