Heidegger on Technology's Danger and Promise in the Age of AI

A thoughtful and enlightening treatment of the dangers and promise of technology today.

Iain D. Thomson (Author)

9781009629430, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 March 2025

74 pages
23 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.123 kg

'Thomson invites us to reassess the ways in which technology not only transforms the world but also reshapes the very conditions of human thought and action …Ultimately, the task of philosophy in the age of AI is not to offer prescriptive solutions but to cultivate a different attunement to the world. Heidegger's concept of Besinnung, meditative thinking, offers a potential path forward - a way of engaging with technology that does not seek to dominate but rather to listen, to dwell, to allow beings to disclose themselves on their own terms, according to their unique internal logic. This is not a call for passivity but for a radical form of engagement - one that refuses the terms of technological enframing and seeks out new modes of relationality. In this sense, Thomson's work is in many ways a call to reanimate our mode of being and to make it genuinely conducive to an ethical and political metamorphosis.' Giorgi Vachnadze, Phenomenological Reviews

How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it? Heidegger already felt this philosophical question concerning technology pressing in on him in 1951, and his thought-full and deliberately provocative response is still worth pondering today. What light does his thinking cast not just on the nuclear technology of the atomic age but also on more contemporary technologies such as genome engineering, synthetic biology, and the latest advances in information technology, so-called “generative AIs” like ChatGPT? These are some of the questions this book addresses, situating the latest controversial technologies in the light of Heidegger's influential understanding of technology as an historical mode of ontological disclosure. In this way, we seek to take the measure of Heidegger's ontological understanding of technology as a constellation of intelligibility with an important philosophical heritage and a dangerous but still promising future.

A Note on the Notes
1. Technology: Pure Comedy or Disturbing Dystopia?
2. From Atomic Weapons to Genetic Engineering and Artificial Intelligence
3. What is Called Thinking in 'the Age of Artificial Intelligence '?
4. Learning to Think through Technology Ontohistorically
5. Situating Heidegger's Thinking of Technology Ontohistorically: Modern Subjectivism, Late-modern Enframing, and the Coming of Postmodernity
6. Thinking a Free Relation to Technology, or: Technology and the Other (Postmodern) Beginning
Abbreviations.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF]