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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? -
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Fifth Head of Cerberus dramatizes the fragility and constructedness of identity in a way that feels urgent in the age of AI. Through stories of cloning, memory, and colonial domination, Wolfe forces us to confront how the self may not be some sort of indivisible essence but something that is shaped, copied, and manufactured.
As AI begins to challenge our assumptions about consciousness, creativity, and authenticity, Wolfe’s work is obviously relevant. It suggests that flourishing may not come from rigidly defending the boundaries of traditional ideas on humanity, rather we need to cultivate a new understanding grounded in humility. We need to gain a new sense of humility in acknowledging that human consciousness and creativity are not sovereign or absolute, but part of a larger ecology of intelligences, whether AI or institutional.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus reminds us that human flourishing in the age of AI may depend less on superiority or mastery, and more on our willingness to reimagine what it means to be human: as a shared, ongoing project of recognition, responsibility, and renewal. -
The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
This is a story about a society that enjoys peace, harmony, and technological advancement at the cost of one small child's misery. The story succinctly encapsulates the ethical quandaries of AI and our technofuture. -
Christian Religious Education in a Missionary Key: Exploring the Border Between the Kingdom of God and the Device Paradigm in Latinx Communities
The article describes the danger posed by Albert Borgmann's device paradigm to the values of the Kingdom of God, which aim towards human flourishing, in Latinx communities. And proposes a view of Christian education to address digital technologies/culture, which grounds AI and which AI is a part of. -
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. -
Can you see the seer? An Advaita Vedānta approach to Consciousness
I want to nominate this work because it should be a critical part of the discussion between AI and Consciousness, especially as understood from the Vedantic perspective. AI provokes fascinating questions about the nature of knowledge and consciousness, and the Vedantic perspective provides fascinating insight the oneness of all beings, insight into the limited body-mind consciousness in the relative world and the absolute consciousness; and illumines human flourishing by leading humanity to turn within to understand the non-difference between the relative (self) and the absolute (Self). -
A NAS/Daily AI created video on "the most welcoming religion in the world"
ims to present the Baha'i Houses of Worship (or temples) as places where members of all religions are welcome, as a form of human flourishing. While the latter is true, other than 2 images, the AI generated Baha'i temples don't look like any of the existing ones. The video also aims to represent the ethic of human unity in diversity that is central to the Baha'i Faith - while there's only so much that can be captured in a 1:13 minute video, mentioning only Buddhists, Christians & Muslims is problematic (some of the comments on Facebook show this). I'm nominating this as an example of an AI work that has good intentions, but creates an incomplete & even inaccurate & potentially contentious picture of the subject of religious flourishing. Perhaps addressing its problems can advance discourse & understanding of human religious flourishing in the age of AI. -
Blindsight
It raises interesting questions as to the *ends* of intelligence, the relationship between intelligence and consciousness or sentience, and the place of humanity in a universe where sentient, conscious beings no longer have a monopoly on intelligence. -
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. -
Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination
This book (my own) focuses on the intersubjective foundations of morality and ethics, and puts human relations to AI in the context of other morally troubling relations with non-humans and "near-humans" that seem to challenge the definition of the human itself.