Barba-Kay

The digital now inflects how we think—and how we think about thinking. While the “most urgent and proximate concern about AI is not the death of theory … [but] the possibility that AI will be deployed for military purposes so as to slip from our control,” Barba-Kay’s long-range concern is the redefinition of intelligence itself, with the artificial version ascendant. “By perfecting digital technology, we are in fact constructing a model of human intelligence, our perfect self. And the more we see ourselves in it (because we are able to), the more it becomes us, the more we become it.”

Algorithmic, utilitarian and putatively neutral, AI represents “the ultimate expression of modern science’s founding gambit, which is to make practical effectiveness primary over metaphysical or philosophical meaning.” What AI cannot do is judge, deliberate or contemplate: AI cannot tell you whether to go to war or whom to marry; nor can it answer the question, quid sit deus? Will we learn not to ask these questions? This is the real threat posed by AI according to Barba-Kay—the withering away of intellectual virtue, practical and theoretical. Should we cease to think and judge, it will not be because the robots do all our intellectual work for us; rather, the cause will be our own embrace of robotic thinking. After all, the devices work best when we think like them.