AI will cause the death of the Enlightenment
The degree to which your room reeks of musty smelling paperback books will probably determine how much you care about Enlightenment era philosophy in 2023. Kissinger, for the record, is nothing short of an Enlightenment-stan, so much so that he made the late 17th century’s philosophy’s potential demise at the hand of AI a major focus point in his previous 2021 book on AI. The authors dove back into those points in the wake of ChatGPT and emerged more frightened than Voltaire walking out without his weekend wig.
Whereas the Enlightenment used an iterative progression of fact based findings to deliver the world the scientific method, modern racism, and other so-called “objective truths”, the authors claim ChatGPT does exactly the opposite.
“Enlightenment science accumulated certainties; the new AI generates cumulative ambiguities,” the authors write.
When college students badger ChatGPT for summaries of Kant or whoever, the authors say they are deprived of the enlightenment process of using facts to dispel mysteries. In other words, there’s no real “understanding” happening here. There’s just a prompt and and answer pulled from…somewhere.
“Inherently, highly complex AI furthers human knowledge but not human understanding—a phenomenon contrary to almost all of post-Enlightenment modernity.” The AI Apostles write.
