Artificial Intelligence and the Kingdom of Means
Every age’s defining desires and corresponding fears are revealed by the gods it worships. For example, an age that worships money and technology — or, if you will, Business and Applied Science, this age’s iterations of Zeus and Hera — reveals its defining desires as material comfort and practical ease (i.e., the absence of desire), its defining sources of fear as personal insecurity and practical inconvenience (i.e., the wellsprings of desire). Such an age will be remembered, if it can even bother to be remembered, for its overflowing abundance of cowardice, idleness, historical and intellectual myopia, nihilistic pleasure-seeking along with its corresponding disregard for the independent existence of one’s fellow men, and unthinking submission to the whims of Atë’s granddaughter, Progress.
Kant’s most dignified version of the categorical imperative, which is to say his fundamental moral law: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”1Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (James W. Ellington, trans.), Indiannapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981, p. 36, 4:429. Artificial intelligence, or rather our mad rush to embrace it as our inevitable future, is in its very design and purpose the outright rejection of this imperative, which was the seed of Kant’s conception of the moral world as a “kingdom of ends.”
AI could not exist as it does, and therefore could not avail us in any of the ways we imagine it will avail us, without its inventors, its financial backers, our governments, and indeed all of us as its passive users and (witting or unwitting) contributors, having assumed the opposite principle, which is to say the redefinition of the moral universe, and hence of ourselves individually and collectively, as a kingdom of means. Not only is it absurd to imagine that any notion of private property or individual rights could survive this latest stage of our ethico-technological revolution, but it is absurd to imagine that a society which could enter this stage in the first place had not already long since relinquished any attachment to such notions, in all but name.
Every politician, public commentator, or pseudo-philosopher who sounds a cautionary note about the dangers of our rapid-onset AI revolution while nevertheless granting, as they inevitably do, “the many exciting benefits that this new technology promises to bring,” is admitting that he or she has no theoretical ground to stand on, but is easily susceptible to the charge of being little more than a nervous Nelly. If the sudden and unreflective abandonment of hundreds of years of political theory about self-ownership and intellectual property as base conditions of practical liberty is to be treated as a non-issue, or at best a minor reservation about “moving too quickly,” then the game is up. The game, that is to say, being modernity. I am not lamenting that fact, but merely noting it. The death of Enlightenment being accepted with little more than a moment’s uncomfortable twitch — and accepted in the name of the triumph of Enlightenment. If ever there were a perfect example of the old saw about every society having a false perception of itself, this is surely it.
