In the Age of AI, Humanity Presses Toward the Infinite
As AI advances, many people have already moved beyond mere anxiety into the reality of being displaced, or compelled to reinvent themselves. Just as the invention of the steam engine reshaped relations of production and the division of labor, gradually replacing dispersed household workshops rooted in locality with centralized factories of ceaseless motion, so too did it turn artisans who once labored in the home into workers on the assembly line. The rise of AI will bring about a similar transformation. Only this time, the first domain to bear the brunt of it will be the division of intellectual labor.
If such a transformation unfolds within a favorable environment, the reshaping of labor may spread with the swiftness of yeast through dough. And in the rifts opened by this reordering, the market too will expand. As Dickens wrote at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” That line is a fitting portrait of societies and individuals struggling onward through violent change. Such an age is always marked by intricate tensions and contending opposites; yet if one can discover within it the means to struggle and respond, one may also discover a new road of breakthrough.
We need to fix our attention on this continually widening market and turn anxiety into action, so that we may answer the demands of a new age. Although our past education and accumulated experience may, at certain moments, become a burden that makes each step forward unusually difficult, we can still understand all this through the lens of the division of labor. The education we have received and the work we have done are, in essence, both products of its demands. And so, as new forms of labor division gradually take hold, new disciplines of study and new forms of work will arise with them. In the earliest stage of such change, one must trust one's own judgment and press forward with resolve. And whether we welcome it or not, we can only enter and accept this new age, become part of it, and, often without fully realizing it, participate in a newly forming order of labor.
I believe a new perplexity will also emerge: this condition of being driven forward as though by fate itself provides even greater emotional fuel for the idea that human beings are destined to be replaced by AI. It can seem as though we are living through a period in which sovereignty is being redivided between man and machine, as though we are preparing to greet an age in which machines rule humankind. It must be said that, for most people, the belief that they will be ruled by machines may itself feel perfectly natural. For they believe in a world built by reason, a world sustained by facts, and within such a world humanity appears terribly small. In a rational order of this kind, the calculating power of machines far exceeds that of the most brilliant human mind, and so replacement comes to seem only natural.
But I must correct this way of seeing things and offer those still moving forward a few points from which to think, and thereby dispel the illusion. Plainly, AI may replace work, but it cannot replace the human being. AI remains, in the end, only a tool. It can express itself only within systems built by human language. It can help human beings arrive more quickly at forms of knowledge that have not yet been logically deduced but that, in the end, can indeed be deduced. Yet outside logic, outside language, AI is powerless. Its greatest significance, perhaps, lies precisely here: it forces us to realize more quickly that reason is both a condition of human progress and one of the forces that press against human self-liberation, compelling us to cultivate a power that breaks through the old boundaries of reason and regains the initiative of sensibility, experience, intuition, and creation. Or to put it another way: no matter how powerful AI's cognitive capacities may become, it must still operate through logic; but logic is only a method, only a tool, whereas human wisdom does not depend entirely upon logic.
This point, in fact, finds an echo in Marx. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he writes: “Sense perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when science starts out from sense perception in the dual form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need — i.e., only when science starts out from nature — is it real science. The whole of history is a preparation, a development, for ‘man’ to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of ‘man as man’ to become [sensuous] needs.”
Each advance in the tools of human life, in one sense, marks the opening of a new field of sensuous practice beyond the boundaries of an older rational order, and from that opening a new world is created, upon which a new rational world is then built. The age of AI is no different. We may foresee that the world of the future will extend far more widely, perhaps even across the entire solar system. That also means the wealth humanity will create will surpass imagination, while the human being himself is pressing onward toward something almost without limit.
And indeed, when we lift our eyes to the stars, why is it that the universe opens its depths before us? Is it not because it is sketching, before our very eyes, the road by which we are to go forward?
