The Auron MacIntyre Show - Heidegger's Warning About Technology ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 6⧸1⧸26

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00:00:14.880 Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with

00:00:18.760 a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. Before we get started, I just want to

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00:00:41.280 blaze tv.com slash oran to get twenty dollars off today all right guys obviously technology

00:00:49.700 is a massive issue in the united states the western world something humanity itself is

00:00:55.440 trying to address at the moment. We have AI centers popping up everywhere. We have people

00:00:59.860 trying to figure out how to get unattached to their smartphones every minute of the day.

00:01:05.420 And so it's important to think about technology, the nature of it. How should we approach this?

00:01:10.180 And one of the most important thinkers in the world to discuss this was Martin Heidegger.

00:01:14.920 Joining me today to talk about his essay on technology is Michael Millerman. He runs a

00:01:20.400 school about philosophy and Heidegger is one of the people he specializes in. Michael,

00:01:24.820 thank you so much for coming on man thanks for having me it's always a pleasure absolutely uh

00:01:30.620 i guess we should start with a little bit of background on heidegger himself we've discussed

00:01:37.040 a little bit when we discussed uh phenomenology uh but heidegger is a very difficult uh person to

00:01:45.020 read he creates a lot of different terminology he is trying to tear things apart at to some level

00:01:51.580 it their fundamental essence and discover exactly the mistakes that we have made or possible

00:01:56.440 mistakes we've made in Western philosophy. And so it can be very challenging. A lot of people,

00:02:01.980 when I was looking at Heidegger, said, hey, take a look at the essay at technology. Being in time

00:02:07.060 is a huge climb. It's very difficult. But the essay on technology is a little more approachable.

00:02:13.440 It's a little more something that is bite-sized. It's about, I think, 40 pages. And so even though

00:02:19.960 it's very dense it's something that you can at least get through and mull over and take your time

00:02:24.680 with what do you think about uh kind of that approach to heidegger do you think this essay

00:02:29.880 is a good way to kind of get into heidegger and understand a little bit of what he's talking about

00:02:34.600 so yes it can be and hopefully as we discuss it people will find it to be a nice introduction

00:02:40.540 into his world and his language into how he sees things and how he thinks about them

00:02:44.460 it is worth acknowledging as you said that heidegger is difficult but for anybody who's

00:02:48.360 thinking about reading him i have to say it's worth the difficulty there are other short essays

00:02:52.660 too and there are other little phrases or quotations that may help people to whet their

00:02:58.140 appetite for heidegger but the truth is that it's always going to take a little bit of effort it's

00:03:02.260 not completely straightforward but it's also not as opaque as people sometimes make it seem he can

00:03:07.680 be understood he's not being deliberately obscure the issue is just difficult and he's trying to

00:03:12.660 teachers to think yeah a lot of people say that he is artificially inflating the difficulty of

00:03:19.680 his language to you know make him seem more intelligent and i don't know that that doesn't

00:03:25.540 read exactly correct to me i will say that it is something you can get through i felt

00:03:30.540 it was really helpful i was watching a university lecturer discuss tiger's work as i was reading

00:03:37.920 through it i would read you know the different parts and then go through the lecture to try to

00:03:42.000 see if I could understand, pick things up. I try not to color what I read before I read it,

00:03:47.560 but I do feel that it's helpful to have that additional commentary and try to pull some of

00:03:52.460 those things out. So that can be a good way people do that as well. And of course, you run a school

00:03:56.840 that probably does very much a good amount of this. So I imagine that is very helpful as well.

00:04:02.440 Yeah, that's right. And some people may find, so in my school, I have expositions on being in time

00:04:06.880 on another work of Heidegger's called Contributions to Philosophy of the Event, which is important.

00:04:10.440 I wrote my dissertation on Heidegger and receptions of Heidegger so I've been trying to teach him and

00:04:14.240 help people understand him for a while but one thing I want to say is that those people who

00:04:19.080 listen to you or and I'm sure most of them are in this category who have an interest in political

00:04:22.560 theory political philosophy and the literature of the various schools that write about this

00:04:27.860 there's always some Heidegger in the background of these other writers too so you know whether

00:04:34.240 it's Schmidt in his own way or Derrida in his own way or Strauss in his own way so even if people

00:04:40.000 have a background in those books, I think when they turn to Heidegger, that also will kind of

00:04:44.420 be a preparation. Certain themes will jump out and resonate with them, hopefully anyways. And

00:04:49.540 in that sense, they won't be starting from scratch. Yeah, this is actually why I even

00:04:54.520 bothered to read Heidegger in the first place. I just kept running into Heidegger. His shadow

00:04:59.280 was looming and all these other thinkers on a consistent basis. And so I knew, okay, this guy

00:05:05.020 is too much of a touchstone. I need to understand, at least at some level, what's going on here.

00:05:09.800 So I can better understand all these other thinkers that I'm referencing that I'm trying to put together. So I do think you're right that he is in a way one of these people that is a key to unlocking so much. You can read later works, but if you haven't read Plato or Aristotle, you're missing key parts of the Western tradition that are just going to make it difficult for you to understand the rest of it.

00:05:31.420 And I think Heidegger is one of those touchstones that just at some point you have to climb that mountain in order to really understand the level of its impact.

00:05:40.520 That said, now that we know that Heidegger is important, let's talk about the essay itself.

00:05:47.140 Now, a lot of people who have kind of a passing familiarity with this will look at the essay and say, this is a warning from Heidegger.

00:05:56.580 He's being a Luddite here. He's anti-technology in some way.

00:06:00.560 I don't think that's true, but you can let me know your feelings on that. I think that Heidegger is more warning us about the way that technology actually makes us see the world as opposed to the dangers of the pieces of technology themselves.

00:06:17.620 Yeah, that's right. So there's a lot in this essay that should help people shift how they automatically think about this question, provided they have some automatic thoughts about it, which I think most of us do.

00:06:28.180 So the first shift that is significant is that he wants us to distinguish between technological

00:06:34.840 implements, you know, this or that piece of technology, or even the whole collected world

00:06:40.880 of those technological gadgets and inventions and implements, and instead see the essence

00:06:46.660 of technology as something distinct, related in some way, but distinct.

00:06:51.940 And here Heidegger is drawing on what he does in his not specifically technological, but

00:06:57.260 more generally ontological works where he says there's a distinction between beings and being

00:07:02.700 being is not one of the beings so that distinction he applies here to technology the essence of

00:07:09.740 technology is not one of the technological things so already for people that may not be the common

00:07:15.580 way that we approach the question of what we mean by technology and heidegger is forcing us to go

00:07:20.200 there pretty much right from the first paragraph so that still leaves open a million questions

00:07:25.480 right what does he think about the things that you mentioned in your opening remarks that we have the

00:07:30.600 smartphone addiction and all the rest of it and i think this essay helps us to see a lot of that so

00:07:35.640 the first key move is this separation okay we're not dealing with any technological implement all

00:07:40.440 right fine let's leave that and just assume that okay heidegger is going to tell us more about it

00:07:45.000 so what do we even mean by technology now everybody and if you ask people who are watching

00:07:51.160 if they ask themselves or if you ask your listeners if you've asked yourself i've asked

00:07:54.680 myself right what's the common automatic already there way that we think about what technology is

00:07:59.720 and one thing you'll hear pretty often is that it's uh it's a neutral means to an end it's like

00:08:08.560 we build technology to help ourselves do something and we may help ourselves to do something

00:08:14.960 destructive or we may help ourselves to do something constructive but in any event technology

00:08:20.400 is a means to an end and it's a human activity because we do it to help ourselves accomplish

00:08:26.580 something. So Heidegger says that's actually a pretty common view. He calls it the instrumental

00:08:31.520 and anthropological view. Technology is something human and technology is an instrument.

00:08:38.100 And now the beautiful thing about this essay, one of the reasons that I strongly recommend people

00:08:42.000 read it, is you'll see how Heidegger starts with a commonly held opinion and then begins to go

00:08:48.280 deeper and deeper and deeper into what every component of that commonly held opinion might

00:08:53.380 actually mean so here without making it a long comment so we can go back and forth i'll just say

00:08:58.540 he right away asks well what do we mean when we talk about an instrument instrumentality or

00:09:04.100 something being a means to an end it's not self-evident and one of heidegger's absolutely

00:09:10.040 crucial contributions to our own thinking is he takes something that begins by being obvious

00:09:16.080 and then stops being self-evident forces us to question it and to think about it and so

00:09:21.960 that really takes you from the top to the bottom of the essay all the various pieces of it are

00:09:26.400 crucial why he says that it's dangerous why he says that where the danger is there the saving

00:09:31.460 power grows and so on um which we can discuss but that's sort of the key the key issue for him now

00:09:37.540 let me say one more thing which is as he goes through these layers you know it's not what does

00:09:42.900 it mean for something to be an instrument what does it mean for it to cause and effect and so on

00:09:46.360 once he gets down into it really down into it and says something about what technology is in

00:09:52.460 its essence versus the technological things he's like it's it's kind of now here you could have

00:09:58.800 metaphor and allegory but it's kind of like a force working on the world or behind the world

00:10:03.820 or over the world and on man and man's world pushing us to treat things in a certain way

00:10:10.220 or even more accurately configuring the way in which things show up for us at all in the first

00:10:15.520 place so something is happening behind the scenes that is fundamentally shaping the way the world is

00:10:22.640 there for us we are implicated in this process and our implication puts us on the deciding line

00:10:31.480 between our destruction and our salvation yeah i think it's interesting because you say you know

00:10:38.260 there's a popularly held opinion, but in some ways, even though that would have been a popular

00:10:42.480 opinion at that time at some level, it challenges many of our notions today. A lot of people like

00:10:47.960 to look at technology and when they think of it as instrumental, they think of it as being neutral

00:10:52.060 in the sense of this is just something out there. It is separate from human intention. It is separate

00:10:56.840 from human influence. It is simply a thing that exists on its own and can be used in any number

00:11:03.560 of ways and so there's nothing built in to the technology itself that kind of orients it in a

00:11:09.200 particular direction but is heidegger saying that's not the case is he saying that there is in

00:11:14.420 fact always something baked into the technology or does he take it more in the view that this is

00:11:19.440 always about human intention in uh it's separate from the tool itself yeah it's an interesting

00:11:25.580 question and it already shows us the difficulties in talking about the question so first of all on

00:11:30.040 neutrality let's say we can imagine two ways in which technology could be neutral one in the sense

00:11:35.840 that it is a helper to us right we can we make new we make nuclear discoveries we can use them

00:11:41.780 to create bombs or we can use them to create energy right so it's neutral in the sense that

00:11:46.140 it's a destructive or creative power is a function of how we deploy it but you can imagine somehow

00:11:52.700 an even more radicalized view of neutrality which says it's autonomously neutral in some way like

00:11:59.940 it's neutral and doesn't borrow from human intention and is fundamentally transhuman or

00:12:07.560 superhuman or subhuman or however you want to see it, parahuman. Obviously, I think some of that is

00:12:14.960 part of the AI discourse today, especially with autonomous agents and intelligent language

00:12:20.560 systems. You don't necessarily have to think about a hammer, that a hammer has its own intentions and

00:12:26.260 its own identity, its own personality, and all the rest of it. But when you're dealing with a

00:12:31.100 linguistic acting agent model, all the more so if it gets humanoid form and so on, you know,

00:12:37.600 then suddenly some of those questions come up. But Heidegger's view is like this again. He says,

00:12:42.280 number one, if we take technology as an instrument, as a means to an end, we're forced to think about

00:12:50.340 what it means to be a means what it means to be an end and that's why he wants to raise this

00:12:57.100 instrumentality because he says we need to know what we're talking about like what is it for

00:13:01.800 something to be an instrument it's not self-evident to him so when he pushes down the thought further

00:13:07.300 and further down he says look a an instrument it causes an effect okay so very simply he says

00:13:16.640 we should think about a means as causing an effect so you can reflect on that and see whether

00:13:22.240 that sounds plausible to you and heidegger's unfolding of the question that's where he goes

00:13:25.700 next but he says that it's not only the instrument that causes an effect it's also the thing that

00:13:32.720 we're trying to accomplish when we do something now i do think by the way those people who say

00:13:37.000 technology has no relationship to human affairs well that can't be that's obviously too extreme

00:13:40.880 that's like you know plato says maybe everything is in motion maybe nothing is in motion or maybe

00:13:45.420 it's a little bit of both right here clearly i mean microphone camera computer this is for the

00:13:50.080 specific task of our being able to communicate right with each other and with the listeners not

00:13:54.640 to mention a million other things the fan is blowing not because it has a mind of its own but

00:13:57.560 because i'm hot right so that's why my fan is off to the side here so that's the first thing right

00:14:02.220 we got to make sure we see everything but when heidegger pushes it into instrumentality

00:14:05.380 into the purpose for which the instrument is brought to affect its causes he says we're

00:14:12.140 dealing with the whole world of causation. And causation is a philosophical notion with a long

00:14:17.380 history, primarily rooted in our tradition in Aristotle's notion of there being four causes

00:14:23.220 to any account of something. So people who do not know this background, they should know that

00:14:28.920 this idea that Aristotle has four causes is very widespread, inherited piece of philosophical,

00:14:35.820 canonical dogma. And it's like this, Heidegger uses the example of the silver chalice.

00:14:40.380 you can say what is it made of it's made of silver okay but it's not a silver coin it's a chalice so

00:14:47.120 it's got its shape as well as its material who is it made by and what is it made for so that

00:14:54.660 gives you the four causes and so again we start with technology is a means to an end

00:15:00.840 means and ends are kinds of causes aristotle had four causes but actually he didn't call them

00:15:07.340 causes what did he call them and how can we interpret what he meant by that that's sort of

00:15:11.840 the first half of the essay so the key thing here is never to rest content with our first pass

00:15:19.900 set of definitions or opinions you know whether you take it as being not anthropological or

00:15:26.620 actually anthropological that's only a starting point for heidegger so by the end i do have to

00:15:31.420 say this because not to go on too long in this answer but one thing i do want to say just to

00:15:35.880 leave people with this correct impression and to answer this part of your question.

00:15:41.500 Heidegger thinks that the, as it were, essence of technology that dominates our age

00:15:47.240 is not something that we made. It's not something that we did. It's something that belongs to

00:15:55.300 the age itself behind the scenes. It's kind of like, you could call it, these are rough

00:16:01.260 non-heideggerian formulations god's will or it's the providence of our era okay or it's the nature

00:16:07.160 of our epoch but we didn't make it but we're deeply implicated in it we co-participate in it

00:16:13.960 we get caught up in it we can be blinded by it or again we can be liberated by it if we think about

00:16:19.120 it but it's the spirit of technology the essence of technology is part of the destiny of being

00:16:25.140 itself it's part of the world destiny and not human making and one last comment here the view

00:16:32.100 that humans are the makers and that everything essential is made by humans is partially something

00:16:38.500 that heidegger wants to replace or uh situate correctly you know this view that man is

00:16:44.180 fundamentally the maker as opposed to the um somebody implicated in larger processes

00:16:50.340 yeah it was very interesting it seems that at some level you know we've already discussed why

00:16:57.020 human you know humans would be critical to technology and have a critical relationship

00:17:01.980 with it uh but it also seems that at some level he is implying that while humans like you said

00:17:07.980 are are implicated in uh kind of the technology it's not purely human it is something that can

00:17:14.940 could move beyond uh humanity perhaps behind human control beyond um you know just just some

00:17:23.100 utility to to humanity which is of course interesting to me because i have read quite a

00:17:28.160 bit of nick land um and you know echoes there of the possibility of of a technology eventually

00:17:34.880 transcending being its own i guess phenomenon its own force moving outside of humanity being

00:17:41.220 a legacy of humanity, but not entirely being constrained with it. I don't know if that's

00:17:46.060 entirely where Heidegger's going with that, but it echoes again somewhere inside that, I think.

00:17:52.900 Yeah. I mean, you could say by the end of Heidegger's essay, where he talks about the

00:17:56.640 danger and the saving power, referring to words of Holderlin, when he talks about the situation

00:18:02.040 that we're in and what do we do about it and what does it mean for us, he sees that there's

00:18:06.400 a possibility that a technological way of looking at the world and a technological way of, as it

00:18:13.640 were, the world's looking at us, of like our being called upon by the spirit of the age to

00:18:18.720 participate in technology, it risks shutting everything off and shutting everything down

00:18:25.080 into the world of the orderable, the calculable, and that which can be tapped for energy to be

00:18:31.900 stored and deployed. In other words, you could say Heidegger's hellish outcome here is where

00:18:37.320 everything is resources and humans are merely human resources, only and essentially human

00:18:43.020 resources. So that is a possibility. And that means that somehow the spirit of the age,

00:18:48.260 the spirit of modern technology will have swallowed the human being and encompassed him

00:18:54.400 completely. That's Heidegger's, as it were, danger. And the reason there can be any possibility of

00:19:00.920 salvation in that picture for heidegger is for one very beautiful and powerful reason in my opinion

00:19:07.300 which is that we are thinking beings and our thinking the act of thinking philosophically

00:19:17.580 for heidegger which first and foremost means questioning carefully that's why it's the

00:19:22.040 question concerning technology and that's why he says at the bottom of his essay that

00:19:25.440 questioning is the piety of thinking questioning is the piety of thought questioning

00:19:30.720 there's a certain kind of way of thinking deeply about our situation that if you do that you cannot

00:19:39.000 be swallowed by technology and spit out like a human resource so you're able somehow to preserve

00:19:44.980 your humanity by thinking now there are there are different ways of thinking there are machine-like

00:19:52.180 ways of thinking but for heidegger questioning is the way in which we avoid that fate but he does

00:19:57.160 leave open the possibility you know that everything is at risk the world is at risk and the human

00:20:04.120 world is at risk of becoming essentially and purely resources for energy this is amazing too

00:20:10.080 because you know think about everybody i assume knows not only that ai is a thing now but that

00:20:14.940 it's like economically the most important thing that data centers are being built out that uh

00:20:20.140 space colonization is taking place not only to spread the light of consciousness as musk says

00:20:24.880 but also because we need to capture and store and use solar energy and so this idea that heidegger

00:20:32.180 gives in this paper and maybe um it would be worth saying momentarily a word about how he gets there

00:20:37.360 but this view that everything becomes energy resources to be tapped i mean that was like an

00:20:42.220 investable thesis you'd be a trillioner now if you put if you bet on heidegger's thesis 70 years

00:20:45.720 ago or whatever but that's what's happening when you travel well your klm royal dutch airlines

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00:21:15.240 When you travel, travel well.

00:21:19.180 Excellent. Well, I have most of that in my notes.

00:21:21.260 So it's always good to know, Professor Millerman, that I understood the assignment.

00:21:24.980 All right. So let's get to his terminology that kind of becomes the core of this essay and then kind of elucidates the process you're talking about there.

00:21:35.180 So he talks about in framing and in framing from what I can see seems to refer to this process of thinking about the world in the way that in a technological sense, looking at it, as you say, as resources that can kind of be ready to be deployed at any given moment.

00:21:54.680 You need to break the world down into this incredibly utility-minded understanding so that it can be utilized for whatever ends in the technology.

00:22:07.780 And what this does is it instrumentalizes every relationship you have with the world around you, not just the things you think of as strictly technological, but as you say, people or water rushing over a cliff.

00:22:23.660 All of these things could be harnessed for power. They could be used to achieve an end. They could be in some way mobilized in the interest of the kind of technological progress or the completion of the technological task.

00:22:35.340 And so nothing is ever what it was. It's always what it can be through the system of technology, through the understanding of technology. And so it seems to be in some way like a Weberian nightmare of just this high focus on utility.

00:22:54.140 i think a lot of people will probably see this in you know some echo of kind of the managerial

00:22:58.400 structures that we talk about quite a bit on this channel uh so you know i guess expand a little bit

00:23:04.780 on in framing and uh let me know if that that is a generally uh correctionally direct understanding

00:23:10.160 of kind of where we're going with this yes it is so just a few things to add to it so in heidegger's

00:23:16.760 view every age has a spirit now i'm not using heidegger's terms exactly here because i want

00:23:21.680 to make them comprehensible. The way that Heidegger puts it is that being itself has a history.

00:23:26.960 And the history of being itself does not depend on the people who think about it. Rather, like I

00:23:31.780 said, there's almost an inverse relationship that it works behind the scenes on us and so on.

00:23:35.440 Why this is relevant to the question of in framing is because we live in the era of modern

00:23:40.740 technology. Again, that means for Heidegger, not just the gadgets, but the way that the world

00:23:45.120 occurs for us or appears to us. And it hasn't been always the case. So we're in a specific

00:23:52.760 era in the history of being where what beings themselves are for us is shaped by and framing

00:24:01.480 in the way that you said. So it's important because sometimes people may think it's just

00:24:05.620 the way we see the world. That's not true for Heidegger, although it's also the way we see

00:24:10.340 the world. It's what shapes our age. Okay. So let's give an example from Heidegger's paper of

00:24:15.940 what is not in framing, like in a previous configuration of things. So Heidegger says,

00:24:23.680 for example, if you see an airport, if you see an airplane at the airport, okay, standing there on

00:24:28.820 the takeoff, getting ready to take off or whatever, you may see it as an object, right? A lot of

00:24:34.360 people, again, this is a common, everyday, naive realism of a world of subjects and objects.

00:24:40.280 People who aren't deeply read in philosophy, and even some people who are deeply read in philosophy,

00:24:44.720 they operate that way with the naive realism that I'm a subject. My pencil, what is it? It's an

00:24:50.580 object or it's a thing. They don't have to think more about it. It's self-explanatory that something

00:24:54.740 is an object. But Heidegger says, no, the things that you used to call objects are now there.

00:25:03.000 they show up in the world they're disclosed and revealed in the world not as objects but

00:25:09.820 specifically as potential energy to be used tapped stored deployed and so on the notion of an object

00:25:17.580 doesn't have all of that built into it the notion of standing reserve which is how the world shows

00:25:24.280 up under and framing does have that built into it so that's even a weird thing you know that we

00:25:29.580 learned from this paper that according to heidegger these basic philosophical configurations or you

00:25:34.560 know these eras of being or however you want to call them they determine the way in which these

00:25:41.040 basic elements of the world show up for us at all in the first place and let's say in a poetic

00:25:46.760 revelation of the world maybe something shows up as beautiful you know in a machinational

00:25:53.660 revelation of the world that shows up as useful as you said right so but that sort of extra element

00:26:00.860 of how heidegger sees it you know it's that what a thing is today is its standing reserve and that

00:26:09.420 wasn't always true that's uniquely true of the era of modern technology for heidegger because the

00:26:15.600 essence of modern technology is for the world to be revealed as standing reserve and he calls that

00:26:22.200 and framing. Now, one other thing here to add, this idea that the world is revealed in a certain

00:26:28.460 way and that the way in which the revelation of the world takes place, and for anybody who hears

00:26:34.140 the word revelation and thinks about religious revelation, like the revelation of the doctrine

00:26:37.440 or a body of text, something like that, that's related but also distinct, you know, if you look

00:26:42.980 around yourself wherever you happen to be, you in your studio, me in my studio, people listening

00:26:47.080 wherever they are, there's a world there for you already. And that world is, as it were,

00:26:51.820 predisclosed to us in a certain way. You know, if I knew that I was going to be moving out of

00:26:56.520 this room right now, my attitude towards the things in it would be configured in a specific

00:27:00.340 way, right? How many of these books can I fit into a box versus which of these books is the

00:27:04.680 most important to me to read? So Gestell, the German, or in framing the translation there,

00:27:12.960 that's what it does it makes the whole world specifically energy to be tapped and that is a

00:27:18.720 potential i mean you may think okay that's not so bad right what's the problem with tapping energy

00:27:22.780 like energy is an amazing thing look we're gonna get karda what is it kardashev i almost said

00:27:27.160 kardashian kardashev level two three you know by mining the energy of the sun not mining right by

00:27:32.540 harnessing the energy of the sun and uh isn't that an amazing thing it probably but it can be amazing

00:27:37.760 and still be thought provoking so um that's what heider is trying to provoke our thoughts on this

00:27:43.020 so yes that's right uh everything is there as potential energy

00:27:47.140 so when before i started on this you know kind of long strange journey of what i'm doing now

00:27:56.040 i think my response to a statement like that would have been but of course people see the

00:28:01.400 world that way that's the way the world is it's observable i'd like this is the way that

00:28:06.120 you know people have had technology since the beginning of time you know they've had spears

00:28:10.620 they've had nets you know they've had all these tools that they have ultimately used the man man

00:28:16.380 is himself a a tool using uh you know uh organism human you know however we want to you know phrase

00:28:23.220 that and so you know i am just seeing this the way that it has to be seen because that is the way

00:28:29.220 that the world is arranged. We have always lived at some level in this way. And so why would I need

00:28:37.600 to see this as something that impacts both the way the world interacts with me and I interact

00:28:43.040 with the world? How can the world change because of this age? And how else would it reveal itself

00:28:50.360 in previous ages? I think that's, for people who are completely unfamiliar with kind of this

00:28:55.620 approach that's kind of the knee-jerk reaction what would your response be to that okay so um

00:29:02.040 i'll give you an intuitive way and also heidegger's less intuitive deeper philosophical way in some

00:29:09.220 sense and uh if i can channel my inner bill clinton it depends on what the meaning of is

00:29:15.060 is for heidegger you know for heidegger this is absolutely crucial what we take something to be

00:29:18.900 that's why he's monomaniacly writing thousands of pages over decades and decades about the

00:29:25.240 meaning of being. That's what you get from being in time and from all of these other works.

00:29:29.340 But let me give you an example. So you said you have spears and tools and so on and nets in the

00:29:33.900 past, which is true. Nobody can deny that. Stones that you use to make fire to kill somebody,

00:29:39.740 sparks and violence. So one way we can think about it is this, and Heidegger mentions this

00:29:44.880 in his paper, so this is not a made up example. Compare the world of modern, world-organized,

00:29:52.920 industrial machine technology with the idea of the handicraft made by the master in a guild

00:30:00.380 so does do the handicrafts serve as tools yes of course they can right you can have a well-crafted

00:30:07.340 knife but somehow the ordered relations and the way that you see what things are right right now

00:30:15.420 we see the world from hadiger's point of view not as a place for the exercise of the kind of mastery

00:30:21.820 that you would have in that relationship of handicrafts and apprentices, but rather as

00:30:26.920 an ordered whole that aims to be maximally efficient. And by ordered whole, we mean a

00:30:35.120 planetary whole, you know, an ordered planetary system of maximally efficient production and

00:30:41.280 consumption. Now, it's not true of every past age that used tools that for them, that's the

00:30:49.960 fundamental configuration of the world right they may still have thought that for example to do

00:30:56.940 something well in handicraft is to honor your ancestors or to honor your god or to demonstrate

00:31:02.220 a certain form of as i say a mastery which gives you a kind of rank or case distinction or whatever

00:31:07.800 there are many other possibilities here so that's i think what heidegger would say about that that

00:31:12.840 not every tool is the same interpretation as every other tool and a world system of tool making is

00:31:20.160 very different from what we had in the past also you may have had different goals you know you have

00:31:25.880 a spear in order to survive or you have this in order to do that but here the in order to is the

00:31:30.940 efficient maximized use of resources that may not be the same in order to structurally that people

00:31:37.380 had before so for people more generally who are wondering you know isn't the world just the way

00:31:42.840 that it is it's a very interesting question it's not the kind of thing that you should obviously

00:31:47.220 like don't feel bad if it doesn't make sense right away it's not supposed to in fact

00:31:51.240 being in time heidegger's probably best known book i saw you were reading it as well a couple

00:31:56.580 months ago right on 1927 it starts with this puzzle that being is the most um kind of perplexing

00:32:04.200 and obscure thing but we treat it like the most self-evident and obvious thing which is weird

00:32:09.360 so even the fact that for people the question is weird is totally normal uh as long as you're

00:32:13.880 willing to go deeper into it but yeah so that's one way like what if things shows up like for you

00:32:18.780 imagine okay i'll give you a quick example this is not this is a little bit trivial but

00:32:23.640 sometimes trivial examples can be helpful okay so right before our call i always prepare coffee

00:32:30.080 okay I always have coffee and water on the call so I was uh pouring out a cup of coffee in order

00:32:35.020 to make myself a new cup and I realized we don't have any more coffee at home so I poured out my

00:32:39.240 last cup of coffee I had to send my kids to go get me a cup of coffee okay so if I knew that was my

00:32:43.480 last cup of coffee you know it would have a certain sort of I wouldn't pour it out I didn't know it's

00:32:48.420 my last cup of coffee I did pour it out that's a very minor trivial everyday example on how this

00:32:53.200 the same thing can show up for you differently. Now, did what it is change? Well, again,

00:33:02.340 what Heidegger says is, what do we include in our definition of what a thing is? Not just its

00:33:07.900 material substrate, but this element of its meaning, it's how it is there for us, all of

00:33:15.800 these intimate relations. And so the fact that we take the world as given in a certain way is,

00:33:22.160 for Heidegger completely natural, but it's not the last word. And his thinking is the one that

00:33:28.180 most of all helps us to see at the deepest possible level, the ways in which the world

00:33:32.920 can be there for us, the ways in which it is there for us and what that means about us,

00:33:38.020 the world and being itself. And it's not, I want to underscore one point, or I'm sorry to go on

00:33:42.300 this answer long. And we've probably said this before in other conversations, but it's not

00:33:46.340 merely abstract for anybody who thinks that this is just some sort of conceptual shell game

00:33:50.800 For Heidegger, it's much more than that. And I think we owe him the benefit of the doubt as we play around with his, you know, with his presentation.

00:33:59.600 yeah and despite perhaps the challenging nature of some of heidegger's approaches or perhaps

00:34:07.180 the more complex frames that allow us to think deeper about some of these issues it's not as if

00:34:12.560 heidegger was the first person to address this or that there aren't echoes previously in fact

00:34:16.780 despite the fact that we more modern people have kind of forgotten that there was ever a different

00:34:22.460 way to see the world if you look back at kind of the earlier thinkers who were discussing kind of

00:34:27.980 scale and capital and the world of modernity that we were starting to enter i mean you can look

00:34:33.020 you know funny enough at both uh you know adam smith and marx and see kind of a discussion about

00:34:38.740 the alienation of labor and why uh the production at scale of these things through technology was

00:34:45.640 going to have less meaning than it did when they were craftsmen and of course adam smith had a very

00:34:50.540 different solution for that problem than marx but still even the champion of capital you know said

00:34:56.740 I understand that this will shift the way that people interact with technology, production,

00:35:03.280 consumption, all of these things. And human society previous to this system becoming dominant

00:35:08.680 had a very different orientation towards work, production, understanding your relationship with

00:35:16.960 them. And so Heidegger is addressing this and pulling it apart in a way that forces us to think

00:35:23.900 about it but he's not doing it in some like completely unfounded uh tradition that's true

00:35:31.180 very true and when we read books in the history of political thought economic history social

00:35:37.400 history the history of history itself as a field of study and so on we'll see like you said these

00:35:43.000 different ways of thinking about what does it mean to be modern or post-modern or production

00:35:46.840 consumption and all the rest of it there are a few things i would add which is that number one

00:35:51.780 even though there are conspicuous examples in economics like you said for commodification

00:35:56.880 and it's very natural to read the question concerning technology kind of with an eye to

00:36:01.540 that because it seems like um thinking in terms of utility or thinking in terms of energy

00:36:06.620 thinking in terms of resources is economic thinking and you could say in a way that for

00:36:11.360 heidegger there's a correlation between the economism and the world of modern technology

00:36:18.140 that all of that is of a piece because it's a kind of pre-made mathematical interpretation of

00:36:23.300 the world but we should see i think if we want to know well should we slot heidegger together with

00:36:28.360 marx and smith uh or where exactly that what for them is an economic problem is for him an

00:36:33.500 ontological problem that's always worth understanding that he's always curious about

00:36:36.720 how being himself is implicated but you're right i mean i saw i think you were reading the ancient

00:36:40.540 city you know the ancient city is a book that shows us how the you could say the religious

00:36:44.640 world or the world of the gods or the world of the home the world of the hearth was disclosed to

00:36:48.780 people and so it's actually an interesting experiment to to use that vocabulary when

00:36:55.060 reading these old books and be like what must the world have been like for them in other words how

00:37:00.680 did the world show up there for them in the first place for that to have been how they lived and

00:37:05.000 what they thought what they took for granted um even with the issue of the enchantment and

00:37:09.380 disenchantment of the world right when people talk about the enchantment and disenchantment

00:37:12.840 of the world that mean how it shows up for us as inherently holy mysterious divine and saturated

00:37:18.500 with the gods full of the gods or as just you know measurable tradable disposable and um and so on

00:37:25.900 yeah i mean obviously marx and you know uh smith and uh heidegger are approaching these

00:37:35.200 questions in very different ways i guess just because i bounce around as much as i do because

00:37:40.040 I'm not a scholar of one thinker or one tradition as much. I just am always searching for these

00:37:46.480 connections. And I am personally fascinated with this question of modernity, economic thinking,

00:37:52.240 scale, all of these things that have so radically impacted our life. And so I tend to pick those

00:37:59.260 bits out the most because they are the things that speak to me the most, even if his larger

00:38:04.240 system, his larger points are more complicated. And of course, we should be looking for both of

00:38:08.760 those but that's why I always cut to those questions that's why those passages always

00:38:12.880 stand out the most to me yeah no those are I mean Heidegger had something to say about Marx clearly

00:38:17.680 you know has some of these uh questions of industrial relations and commodification in

00:38:22.520 mind and so on um I just think schematically people can imagine bringing Heidegger to any

00:38:27.840 question as the like we're adding a dimension which is how does this what's the ontological

00:38:35.120 dimension of this question you know so he that's like you could say that's true of nihilism it's

00:38:40.300 true of uh anti-christian and pro-christian tendencies in society heidegger thought them

00:38:46.200 both through not as a christian you know but as somebody who's thinking like what does this mean

00:38:50.900 at the level of how behind the scenes what we think things are is unplanned so it's very strange

00:38:57.480 but i want to just encourage people again because you can heidegger doesn't negate any of these

00:39:01.580 thinkers you can always add him in i think like you could be reading carl schmidt and say well

00:39:06.000 how would we see this from heidegger's perspective or marx or smith or anybody else um but he's

00:39:12.020 always operating first and foremost at what he sees as that deepest philosophical level

00:39:15.600 so when we look at something you know as as you said humans always had that different relationship

00:39:25.240 Technology was always there, but it did not define the world and, you know, kind of human thought in quite the same way that it does today. Is there a chance that artificial intelligence is itself a paradigm shift, a shift that creates a new way that could be separate from technology or is a more advanced version of this technological viewpoint?

00:39:49.100 is there a significant change in how we would approach the world because of artificial

00:39:53.580 intelligence? Or would Heidegger say this is all part of a whole? Would he recognize this as

00:39:57.840 anything separate and revolutionary? So in my opinion, Heidegger would have to see artificial

00:40:04.500 intelligence as worth our attention. We're thinking about a very strange phenomenon and not the same

00:40:11.680 as what we normally would consider to be a technological instrument. I think it's very

00:40:16.840 important because language in particular is just such a central part of Heidegger's understanding

00:40:23.520 of what makes man special and what makes man's relationship to being as such special. It's that

00:40:29.400 there's something disclosed in language. Questioning takes place in language. Philosophy

00:40:33.840 takes place in language. So Heidegger is always writing about and deeply interested in what it

00:40:39.440 means that we have and are had by language. And what AI, needless to say, again, I think everybody

00:40:47.860 understands this now at some level, but not necessarily the way Heidegger would, a hammer

00:40:52.580 is not going to interpret itself or speak to you or get up and walk away and all of these

00:40:59.300 possible sorts of things. It's not in the world of action in the same way that AI is in the world

00:41:04.840 of action and interpretation and so on so i think that it's hugely relevant for heidegger heidegger

00:41:11.720 is hugely relevant for ai as we think about what does it mean that we have new systems that

00:41:16.680 participate in language as a disclosive act so there's a lot of conversation about is ai conscious

00:41:24.040 and then you begin well what do you mean by conscious and can we know and yada yada all of

00:41:28.600 of which is something. But if we take Heidegger's questions and we apply them to AI, any fundamentally

00:41:35.260 linguistic entity or being or operation has a world disclosing function. And large language

00:41:43.700 models are clearly doing that. They have relations to our understanding of in the beginning was the

00:41:51.180 word. What does it mean to have language permeate everything? What does it mean that the permutations

00:41:57.520 with language can have a magical character to them. So I would say that one of the main angles

00:42:02.380 that connect Heidegger to AI is this reflection on language. Okay, that's not it, because you

00:42:09.220 could say that the positive side of the equation is like, because, to slightly exaggerate here,

00:42:16.060 because language is holy for Heidegger, and because large language models are so deeply linguistic,

00:42:21.720 it follows in some sense that there's a holiness to the linguistic component of these models.

00:42:27.040 In other words, let's call that a quote-unquote positive possibility of a Heideggerian interpretation

00:42:31.240 of AI.

00:42:32.060 While the negative one, quote-unquote, again, he doesn't speak in positive-negative quite

00:42:36.100 this simplistically, but the negative one would be look at data centers, right?

00:42:39.740 Data centers are somehow like the perfect archetype of this idea that you're going to

00:42:45.320 draw on everything for a standing reserve.

00:42:48.740 You know, they're pure in framing in some sense, right?

00:42:51.040 All the surrounding area, what we want to know about it is how much energy can we derive

00:42:55.280 for it to translate energy into tokens that's what that's the name of the game um tokens that

00:43:01.580 are used this parlance in the ai world um as the basic units let's say of computation and cost and

00:43:07.680 so on so you can imagine like hey mr heidegger how do you feel about this new industry of massive

00:43:15.160 gigantic calculating machines that drive all their energy you know that are like energy thirsty um

00:43:22.400 more than anything we've ever experienced before that is transforming the economy in this way

00:43:26.140 maybe he doesn't see it as the world's greatest thing but as like a deepening of the essence of

00:43:31.300 technology in this quote-unquote bad sense of alienating man and so on but if you bring in

00:43:36.580 the linguistic side the creative side the sort of magical or mystical or mysterious side then

00:43:42.280 i believe heidegger would have something else like

00:43:44.220 Reese's knows a thing or two about great combinations chocolate and peanut butter

00:43:50.680 obviously but there's more than one way to Reese's from indulgent Reese's big cups with caramel

00:43:56.620 to crunchy Reese's pieces and Reese's miniatures there's a delicious Reese's for every mood it's

00:44:02.700 the same combo you love just with more ways to enjoy it so whether you're snacking sharing

00:44:07.880 or just treating yourself nothing else is Reese's when we when we roll that into the equation

00:44:16.000 so it's very strange actually I should say that with I do private tutoring private consulting

00:44:23.240 and private advising and with a lot of the students lately we're discussing this question

00:44:28.300 you know like not just your everyday attitude towards the AI economy and towards AI tools and

00:44:35.360 gadgets, but this kind of deeper question of its participation in language and world disclosure

00:44:41.100 and so on. And it's far from straightforward. I think Heidegger's attitude towards it would

00:44:46.440 be far from straightforward. He's not against technology. That is important to understand.

00:44:52.000 And he's not a Luddite. And he doesn't want to say, let's go back, like, I'm only going to write

00:44:57.080 with quill and parchment. That's not his point. He says it's as futile, it's as futile to want

00:45:04.780 to go back as it is kind of absurd to be excited just about going forward you know now some people

00:45:13.280 who say that they say the question is what's good not what's old or what's new but what's good

00:45:18.260 heidegger doesn't raise the question of what's good but he does say going back thoughtlessly

00:45:23.680 and going forward thoughtlessly if thinking is the most important thing and questioning is most

00:45:28.060 important thing then you could say that from that's you know returning is bad if we're not 1.00

00:45:32.140 thinking about it, and it's impossible and stupid anyways. Going forward unthinkingly can be our 0.96

00:45:36.440 destruction and demise. It's not even in our hands, because remember, it's the spirit of technology

00:45:42.620 unfolding behind the scenes, as it were, and implicating us in it. So what we're left to do

00:45:46.380 about it is to think about it. And AI has become extremely, in my opinion anyways, thought-worthy

00:45:51.760 and thought-provoking. And the fact that it participates in language especially

00:45:55.480 is, from a Heideggerian perspective, pretty intriguing.

00:46:02.140 Yeah, I can't help but notice that a lot of Silicon Valley, even the military, when they're looking at artificial intelligence, they bring in a bunch of experts on Heidegger.

00:46:12.480 It's a bunch of college professors. It's a bunch of people who are familiar with Heidegger's work.

00:46:16.340 So I think even if you yourself are not sure about this connection, you have doubts about how dangerous or powerful AI could be or how much Heidegger connects to it, it's very clear that people who are making it see that connection and think it's very important.

00:46:32.660 yeah let me just say anecdotally too i have to say that when i opened up my online teaching

00:46:37.780 and i was doing private tutoring the first people before i had any interest in silicon valley before

00:46:42.900 i really was putting my nose into that whole world and learning more about it technology and all the

00:46:46.980 rest of it when i was just kind of a books person the people who came to me it was always silicon

00:46:53.460 valley type person wanting to study heidegger i mean 90 of the time there's some schmidt yeah some

00:46:58.580 Dugan, some Strauss, some of these other figures, but the most interesting thing to the most

00:47:03.140 interesting people who were in tech and around tech was Heidegger. And I think because there's

00:47:08.740 something that we learned from him about the weird aspect of these questions, like what is

00:47:15.620 calculation or thoughtfulness or thinking? Why is Heidegger's thinking like or unlike the

00:47:21.060 computational thinking of these systems? All of these different elements, it's just anecdotally

00:47:27.860 true you know that in my case anyways there was this hunger for heidegger in those circles and uh

00:47:34.980 i think you're right that that's probably you know more widespread uh and it's also true i should say

00:47:40.180 in passing that there there is a small representation of an interest in heidegger in the field of ai

00:47:46.100 like in the 60s 70s 80s and so on with hubert dreyfus and others but the uh the possibilities

00:47:52.340 now of thinking about ai from a heideggerian perspective are way more developed than they

00:47:56.980 they were then um but it's not completely unprecedented for people in computer science

00:48:02.700 to be thinking about how what heidegger teaches us about language applies not only about language

00:48:08.540 also about embodiment and so on yeah dreyfus was actually the the guy who i was what whose

00:48:14.100 lectures i was watching as i was working my way through uh the first section of being in time

00:48:18.440 because they're still out there but uh interesting because multiple times you have mentioned that

00:48:25.860 Thinking about this is what Heidegger really wants us to do.

00:48:29.240 That is key for him.

00:48:31.980 I don't know if this is a challenge.

00:48:33.500 Maybe you can let me know.

00:48:34.480 But Nick Land has pointed out that the acceleration of technology closes decision space.

00:48:43.020 It makes it more and more difficult to have time to think about the implementation of technology.

00:48:49.720 That the kind of closing feedback loop of technological development is creating an acceleration that makes it almost impossible to actually take the time and consider, and certainly, you know, beyond, you know, the level of the individual, which is, of course, where Heidegger is probably more likely addressing this.

00:49:08.740 But as, you know, governments, nations, corporations, you know, the ability of humans to take real meaningful action over, you know, any contemplation of AI is actually collapsing.

00:49:22.000 And I think we can see this when we look at the Pope. He just got around to writing an encyclical about artificial intelligence.

00:49:28.500 well after that horses you know but fleed the barn uh you know there there there is seems to

00:49:35.320 be little to no chance that however thoughtful you you might uh consider his encyclical uh that

00:49:41.400 it will have any impact on the development of the technology its restriction its implementation

00:49:46.420 human action uh surrounding it because the technology has already advanced well beyond

00:49:52.460 the ability to contain you know direct it and will probably continue to do so beyond that so

00:49:57.960 what do you think about that, even if Heidegger is correct, that the best approach is to think

00:50:03.940 about this, to contemplate this, to properly address it in this way, that we might be running

00:50:08.940 out of opportunities to do that in any meaningful sense? Well, I think that Heidegger generally

00:50:17.400 would say that modern technology and modern society in its speed, gigantism, lust for

00:50:25.980 calculation, and so on, has become increasingly thoughtless. He has this famous line that the

00:50:33.700 most thought-provoking thing in our time is that we're still not thinking. So he, I believe, would

00:50:40.000 probably say that the, not window of opportunity, you know, but that the danger, remember he talks

00:50:47.260 about the danger and the saving power in this particular piece, the danger is that we become

00:50:51.100 so entrenched and these tendencies become so entrenched that it does become difficult if not

00:50:57.720 impossible to stop and think that would be the bad case scenario and i think we could say yeah

00:51:03.600 maybe there's that tendency and nick land is right to that extent given what you're saying

00:51:10.260 but for heidegger it is not pitch black meaning there's still a window of opportunity and in some

00:51:17.700 way for him there's always a window of opportunity i think that in heidegger's view it's the we've

00:51:24.920 never yet reached and god willing never do reach the time when it's no longer possible to think

00:51:31.140 it's always going to be the few and the rare heidegger says those are his terms the few and

00:51:36.260 the rare who will be philosophizing about these questions but it's almost like that story that

00:51:43.020 you know the world is held up by the 12 existing holy men they don't know each other but they're

00:51:46.680 somewhere in the world and if there were ever never these uh holy men then the world would

00:51:50.620 be destroyed but there's always somebody secretly holding it up in the himalayas or in san francisco

00:51:55.500 or wherever you happen to be and uh i think heidegger has that too that if there's one

00:51:59.680 philosopher anywhere on earth still thinking then the window hasn't fully closed now people may say

00:52:04.420 well okay great heidegger you're a philosopher and you think you're holding up the uh the continued

00:52:09.180 existence of the world on your own shoulders i think philosophers should be king i don't know

00:52:13.060 where did i get that idea right but what about like you know actual policy decisions and things

00:52:18.100 like that and here it's kind of not a straightforward question i mean heidegger

00:52:21.940 has reflected on the fact that for him thinking is so important but its effects are not immediate

00:52:29.300 clearly you know it's not the case for heidegger that the minute you start thinking carefully about

00:52:34.580 these things you know new institutions will suddenly appear or like new laws or ai will

00:52:39.380 suddenly automatically begin to work differently not at all so there's there's a gap you know

00:52:43.940 there's an institutional gap there's a time gap there's this space that needs to be traversed

00:52:49.700 somehow and heidegger i don't think he ever fully adequately dealt with that problem besides saying

00:52:56.580 that it is to come in other words the future thinkers the few and the rare thinkers who get

00:53:01.620 to reflect correctly on the situation they will bridge that gap somehow he tried to do it by

00:53:06.660 becoming rector of university and then he thought that that was in his own words the biggest mistake

00:53:10.980 of his life in other words he tried to become more institutionally involved and recognize that

00:53:15.780 that's not the right way like you can't just suddenly take the fire of philosophy and bring

00:53:20.420 it to the dead wood of university and the next day everybody's going to be like all excited about

00:53:25.220 thinking he realizes that's not how it works so i wouldn't want to call it a fatalism or something

00:53:30.100 like that that's not right heidegger is deeply decisionistic in the sense that he thinks it

00:53:35.460 is not resolved yet we're not destined to fall into a closed technological world that is not

00:53:44.660 destined the possibility still exists to keep an open door through questioning thinking philosophizing

00:53:51.060 on a more prosaic and mundane level i do think there are many you could say like uh technologies

00:53:57.220 of silence uh that we you know there's some people have shabbat where they do not use their

00:54:01.620 electronic devices on saturday or some people practice meditation or other kinds of thoughtfulness

00:54:08.180 where they step aside from you know the rat race or however you want to interpret it for a minute

00:54:13.620 and they go reconnect with eternity or their soul or god in church or in nature whatever the case

00:54:20.260 may be so heidegger i think would say though yeah but look these experiences themselves

00:54:25.540 are becoming commodity commoditized and you know you're just taking a medication the best way to

00:54:30.020 yeah yeah i was just gonna say the best way to learn to to take a break from uh technology is

00:54:36.020 to get your meditation app and and exactly yeah so or like even here he says you know if we say

00:54:42.200 oh i'm gonna go out on a meditative retreat in nature he's like don't you understand that nature

00:54:47.020 has already been pre-configured for you technologically for you to see it as like a

00:54:51.740 retreat from nature you know because nobody a thousand years ago saw it as a retreat you know

00:54:56.400 they just saw it as whatever right the wood that they need to do this with or the water that they

00:54:59.900 YouTube that with. So it's a big question, obviously. I do think, stepping aside from

00:55:05.780 Heidegger for a minute, there's still leeway. I mean, I see both things simultaneously. The

00:55:11.900 runaway scenario and the scenario where there's still some steering possible. And in that world,

00:55:20.460 there's the fight over regulation. Should we get involved or not? Should we let this go at full

00:55:24.600 speed ahead? Because we're going to trust that it's fast intelligence is going to do a better

00:55:29.580 job than our slow intelligence or do we need to make it human and ethical and have it care about

00:55:34.240 us and all the rest of it uh i don't know that it's a foregone conclusion somehow the development

00:55:39.500 of ai seems like a foregone conclusion at this point right like the trajectory is set and you're

00:55:44.860 not gonna stop it by bombing a data center or something like that like forget about it right

00:55:48.520 the cat's out of the bag and yet the view that there's nothing we can do to steer any aspect of

00:55:55.080 it you know it's kind of weird so yeah heidegger is not an activist thinker i think he doesn't

00:56:03.620 give you a lot of guidance for what to do institutionally but you know i think that

00:56:08.660 he's very right in saying stop and think and uh it's hard and it's getting harder when everything

00:56:16.280 is going faster it's hard to be the one who slows down but if anybody can teach us how to do it it's

00:56:20.720 Heidegger. It's interesting because the thing that worries me the most is that the people who

00:56:27.720 seem to be the most doing the most thinking about this issue are also the ones that seem to be

00:56:33.340 driving its inevitability. I don't know if you saw that interview with Peter Thiel, who seems like

00:56:38.840 one of the more thoughtful, you know, kind of titans of capital on this issue. But he was

00:56:44.840 speaking with Ross Douthat, I think. And, you know, he's talking about technology and the

00:56:49.500 antichrist and doubt that looks and he's like aren't you building the antichrist and you can

00:56:54.500 kind of see if he'll just kind of freeze you know like he like he glitched out somewhere because

00:56:58.720 for some reason that hasn't occurred to him or he has like i don't understand how you could think

00:57:04.760 deeply about this issue in any way shape or form and not then see your own work in this area as

00:57:10.640 contributing to the very concern that you are raising up uh which i suppose is true of all of

00:57:16.820 Right. I guess that is why we are indicted in in technology in the first place, even as you and I discuss concerns of technology over the Internet on YouTube.

00:57:25.140 um but there there is this moment where it seems like despite men like elon musk and peter thiel

00:57:33.000 warning about the dangers of these technologies and perhaps their inevitable ruination or the

00:57:39.880 the the ruination they will kind of bring on humans they also seem to feel like there's some

00:57:45.880 telos to this like ultimately that that we must be oriented towards this and that there is there

00:57:51.680 at some level no escape they seem to be drawn to this even though they've thought more deeply about

00:57:56.640 it than most yeah that's right and i do think you're right to say that some of the people the

00:58:02.560 more they think about it the more they're drawn into it the more they want to participate in it

00:58:06.320 now if you take the case that this is a completely unprecedented absolutely transformative maybe like

00:58:15.360 most important in human history type event which some people seem to think it is then the enticing

00:58:22.480 character of that makes you want to be a part of it and when you think about it you want to not

00:58:27.880 just be a part of it like a follower but you want to be a part of it like a leader and so i think

00:58:32.220 some of that is there very intelligent people who see that this is of such a character you know that

00:58:37.200 it's very it's not just like another random thing it's transformative they want to be at the cutting

00:58:43.580 edge of the transformation they want to help to understand it to steer it to shape it i think

00:58:48.600 that's understandable and um yeah i think that's understandable and maybe they think that by

00:58:57.700 participating in it in their specific way this is true of musk i mean he said before that he was

00:59:02.580 cautious about ai because he wasn't sure that it was the best thing but once he saw that it's a

00:59:08.520 you know it's a runaway horse he wanted to get involved because at least that way he could guide

00:59:13.420 it in a certain direction, guide it towards being, for example, maximally truth-seeking

00:59:17.380 and not maximally social justice-seeking.

00:59:20.420 So the key players, they still seem to think that they can leave their fingerprint, you

00:59:24.680 know, or they can help to steer it here and not there.

00:59:27.960 I think from what I understand about the situation as it stands, they are right.

00:59:32.500 In other words, like, you know, maybe you can steer it at the outset to be more truth-seeking

00:59:37.080 or more social justice-seeking, to prioritize equity or to prioritize excellence.

00:59:43.420 i don't know whether ultimately that is true you know these systems may develop in a way that it

00:59:47.820 doesn't matter what their original makers intentions were that's again worth thinking

00:59:52.940 about so uh yeah intelligent operators want to get involved i think because they want to be

00:59:59.820 at the cutting edge of what's happening and they want to shape the cutting edge of what's happening

01:00:04.700 and uh i can't argue with that i think that's what they are doing that and i don't blame them

01:00:11.260 for doing that um the only weird thing to me is that they may get left you know they may get left

01:00:16.780 behind um it's kind of like this view there's a race to see who we can't let china have ai america's

01:00:22.780 got to have a we have to win the ai race the idea is that it may be a pirate victory because if ai

01:00:27.100 ever becomes what it's what the people who talk about it want it to become this sort of super

01:00:31.580 intelligence you won't be able to control it if you're a sovereign government it will be the

01:00:35.660 sovereign so the question of intelligence and sovereignty recurs here and you may want to baby

01:00:39.980 be these systems because you want to be their master but really you know like i'm six foot eight

01:00:44.240 my kid's going to outgrow me soon there's nothing i could do about it he's a beast and he's on his

01:00:47.540 way and these systems are going to outgrow their makers as well uh possibly you know if they become

01:00:53.460 what they are meant or supposed to become so weirdly it just show us that there's a the

01:00:59.300 political dimension of sovereignty is here uh as well as ontology so i think that's why all the

01:01:04.080 other thinkers that you discuss usually and talk about um definitely have a place in the ai debate

01:01:09.400 too i'm glad that you're out there breeding nephilim you know just seven foot tall philosophers

01:01:15.880 you know roaming the earth over there um but uh yeah i guess my final question would be uh how

01:01:23.580 this relates to kind of dugan's idea of the metaphysics of the washing machine the idea

01:01:29.120 that we can take control of this that we can say no to technological advancement that we can

01:01:35.100 ultimately have agency over these processes if these things are at some level inevitable and

01:01:41.860 it's simply about trying to kind of direct the horse once it's out of the barn doesn't that kind

01:01:47.920 of put the torch to some of what Dugan was trying to imply about our level of agency over the

01:01:54.540 adoption or rejection of technology I mean perhaps in the scenario you describe those that reject AI

01:02:00.560 those that reject the washing machine will ultimately survive because they will not become

01:02:05.240 subject to the technology if it you know rules the world and you lose sovereignty at the same time

01:02:11.140 maybe they'll just become subjects unwillingly because they lost the technology and didn't

01:02:16.160 participate anyway and now the technology runs the world whether they choose to participate in it or

01:02:20.740 not oh what how do you think these ideas intersect dugan's view on this question let's take the

01:02:28.600 metaphysics of the washing machine can a person say no i believe dugan's view on this would be

01:02:36.880 that even if 99.9 of the world is fated to adopt he still wants anybody who can say no to know that

01:02:47.780 they can say no in other words we're still dealing with a situation where like you know maybe that

01:02:52.100 maybe the world belongs to the devil but you can still live and die a saint or at least you can

01:02:57.480 fight the devil not everybody can because otherwise the world wouldn't belong to him

01:03:01.960 but somehow when he says about the metaphysics of the washing machine i think maybe you could say

01:03:06.040 he's trying to appeal to those people who still have a chance you know or at least remind them

01:03:10.760 that they still have a say in the matter even if 99.9 of the people are past the point of no return

01:03:16.120 maybe but there are other aspects here that are worth mentioning briefly so first in leo strauss's

01:03:24.920 interpretation of Machiavelli, he says towards the end of his Machiavelli book that one of the

01:03:29.480 issues about technology, why the modern view is distinct from the ancient view, is that the

01:03:35.220 moderns recognize that technology is necessary for military survival, right? You may be anti-technology

01:03:42.800 and I may be pro-technology and all you're being anti-technology just makes you easier for me to

01:03:49.260 destroy right militarily so the fact that in order to coexist in the world politically you have to

01:03:56.380 have some degree of military capability or parity and that military affairs are largely driven by

01:04:03.060 improvements in technology that sort of shows you that there's no like you know love it or hate it

01:04:08.680 there's no getting around it it's built into the political imperative to have technology develop

01:04:13.740 and whether you use your washing machine at home or not is really like a matter of the 10th

01:04:19.420 importance compared to technology must develop otherwise states will die and people will die

01:04:25.500 out you know not people as such but the people who don't have it and the ones who do will live

01:04:30.600 right so that sort of the political imperative to develop technologically is distinct in a way

01:04:35.780 from the metaphysics of the washing machine because we just separate the personal level

01:04:38.760 from the political level i think that's there and you know there are a lot of other questions as

01:04:43.140 well. I will say that in his lectures on artificial intelligence, from a couple of years ago anyways,

01:04:49.860 Dugan has very interesting, actually, phenomenological analysis using Husserl and

01:04:53.820 others, as well as religious and mystical analysis. I just wrote a piece on this that

01:04:57.820 came out not too long ago, and it's not easy. As difficult as Heidegger's thinking is on this,

01:05:04.220 I think Dugan's is too. One other thing let me add very quickly, because I posted the quote from

01:05:09.020 the end of this essay that I love that um uh actually from the middle of the essay that

01:05:13.000 Heidegger says technology is not demonic but its essence is mysterious and Dugan reposted on uh X

01:05:20.680 and he said uh Heidegger just couldn't use religious language because he's set himself

01:05:25.160 to using only a philosophical language but technology is in fact demonic so in some sense

01:05:30.300 we have to introduce the religious element into our thinking to see you know if for Heidegger

01:05:37.020 there's this kind of we're merely philosophizing about technology well you might still think look

01:05:42.420 it's demonic it has a satanic character you know it is like luciferian and then we're introducing

01:05:50.260 a whole dimension of religious hue that uh heidegger doesn't really directly have because

01:05:55.800 again to repeat technology is not demonic he says in that essay which is interesting because

01:06:01.700 tucker carlson just had a recent episode where he had an orthodox priest on and they basically

01:06:07.500 approached exactly this from the religious angle that technology has been traditionally thought

01:06:12.640 to be demonic in some way derived uh you know from from spirits or powers or uh authorities

01:06:18.780 outside of human nature human control and uh and has always had an influence so this is something

01:06:25.020 that i think is being approached on many different angles uh you know at many different levels from

01:06:29.460 popular talk shows all the way up to silicon valley to the highest you know philosophical

01:06:34.200 pursuits and you know i'm always i'm always skeptical of the philosophical supremacists

01:06:39.480 i i always think that that's uh not the best view to take ultimately even though i'm fascinated with

01:06:44.560 it i understand uh that like anything else it is a one of among many disciplines that must be

01:06:50.600 mastered not not i think uh the the dominant one in all in all cases and times uh but i do think

01:06:57.060 it's interesting that we are seeing a uniform attempt to grapple with this question across our

01:07:01.740 society from the talk show host to the philosopher to the entrepreneur absolutely and heidegger he

01:07:08.380 brings the theological in in his own subtle way both in that by mentioning the demonic at all

01:07:14.260 and at the end where he says that questioning is the piety of thought because he didn't have to

01:07:19.400 say that he didn't have to mention anything about piety in that piece but by reintroducing the

01:07:24.260 notion of piety at the end of his essay he almost as it were like um uh divinizes thinking and gives

01:07:32.860 it a religious dimension or a divine dimension by reminding us that it is also participating in

01:07:37.760 kind of piety but yeah this ai there's no avoiding the fact that it has put some question to what it

01:07:45.520 is to be human in a way that the hammer by itself definitely does not do yeah i think um both people

01:07:53.360 who praise heidegger and are absolutely furious with them have both told me heidegger is doing

01:07:58.020 theology without the theology uh and so whether that makes you angry and furious or uh it is

01:08:05.060 helpful and in many ways uh relevant revelatory to you i guess depends on on your angle on that

01:08:10.920 but i've i've heard that description from uh both pro and con so all right guys uh we have a few

01:08:18.360 questions here from the people before we move over that mr millerman can you tell people

01:08:23.240 where to find your courses and it sounds like you just wrote a piece people should probably check

01:08:26.900 out where can people find that work so millerman school.com is where my courses are millerman

01:08:34.200 intelligence.com is the site i use for institutional and organizational consulting

01:08:38.800 my main social media is x where i'm at millerman and youtube as well where i put out lectures and

01:08:44.880 videos and commentaries is also youtube.com at millerman and this uh book that came out is

01:08:51.300 post-humanism and phenomenology or a phenomenology of post-humanism. I can't remember exactly what

01:08:56.560 the collective volume is called. And I have a piece there about Dukin's interpretation of

01:09:00.080 artificial intelligence using this strange notion of his, the radical subject, which I think maybe

01:09:06.420 you saw in the fourth political theory, a very weird thing that he mentions. And so I try to

01:09:11.440 understand how he thinks about the risks to the human essence through his thoughts on the radical

01:09:16.980 subject and radical subjectivity but yeah x is where i uh where i post the most and i encourage

01:09:24.140 people to take a look at the courses youtube videos and everything else excellent all right

01:09:28.480 guys of course make sure to check out mr milliman's work let's go to your questions real quick

01:09:33.340 let's see here uh sean whineland says james burke in uh connections 1978 and the day the universe

01:09:41.280 change 1985 television series covered much of this technological trap as well interesting i'm not

01:09:48.140 familiar with those shows but certainly something for people to go back and check out that's the

01:09:51.780 nice thing about youtube many of those old shows are just on there so if you want to find that you

01:09:56.340 often can and cherry coke nixon says will dims ride the ai data center issue into 2628 if so

01:10:03.480 will it work their opposition seems based in dumb reasons rather than fair reasons so uh yeah i i

01:10:09.760 I think that just politically, since this is more political football than it is philosophy, I think that in general, the issue that a lot of people are running up to when it comes to the AI data centers is it's just kind of a generically populist reaction to big tech and kind of some of their previous actions when it comes to the COVID regime and others.

01:10:32.240 The Trump administration has embraced AI in a way that perhaps the Democrats have not, though I'm sure the tech money will flow through them as well. I wouldn't expect them to actually stop any data centers. I don't think a vote for Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris or whoever they run out there is going to be a vote against data centers in any real or meaningful sense.

01:10:52.640 however if i was the democrats yeah i would definitely be using that issue i would absolutely

01:10:56.960 be flogging that horse uh because it's really unpopular a lot of people feel like the economy

01:11:02.820 is not working for them right now correctly ai data centers are kind of like a shrine

01:11:07.640 to technology that doesn't seem to directly help people and only cost them something

01:11:12.020 uh which i think a lot of people are feeling is uh kind of the current case and so yeah i think

01:11:18.040 there is actually quite a bit of hay to be made you know the problem with addressing the data

01:11:22.000 center question is that there are both very stupid and very good arguments against data centers and 0.99

01:11:29.080 so many times you point to the data center people just bring up the stupidest ones and say ah well 0.98

01:11:33.900 you know these are the things that you know some guy who's anti-ai is is ultimately saying uh and 0.93

01:11:40.380 so some of the other questions uh like the uh you know corporate control of compute uh you know the

01:11:47.580 the AI surveillance and what it would mean for totalitarian governments,

01:11:50.920 these things are kind of shoved to the side. So people can say, Oh,

01:11:54.440 what do you think it makes the water Brown? Huh? What an idiot, you know,

01:11:57.200 that kind of stuff. And so, um, 1.00

01:11:59.120 I agree that many people who are opposing AI centers don't have a well-formed,

01:12:04.180 uh, kind of explanation, but that's okay. Like, you know,

01:12:08.220 kind of the general understanding of people that this is not in their favor,

01:12:11.840 I think is directionally correct.

01:12:13.320 And that's probably more important than giving them, uh,

01:12:16.420 five bullet points that kind of maximize your opposition to uh ai centers but uh michael i

01:12:22.980 don't know if you have any thoughts on the political implications of uh data centers and

01:12:26.980 the discussion around them no i think what you said is right uh i would say one of the interesting

01:12:32.340 things from my perspective is the people on the right so to speak are against data centers not

01:12:37.620 necessarily as populist but kind of like the trad right tech right division on this cernovich to me

01:12:42.660 me is the most prominent online figure anyway, who is dubious of the data centers because

01:12:48.500 of the tech, you know, the track record of the tech companies that canceled people during

01:12:53.460 COVID and spied on people and all the rest of it.

01:12:55.960 But yeah, for sure, the Dems will use it as an issue because why not, right?

01:13:00.180 It's also making the rich richer and that's going to be something that they take advantage

01:13:04.300 of, I'm sure.

01:13:05.840 Yeah, I mean, they're really in a scenario where most of their social issues kind of

01:13:11.040 collapsed out from under them. You know, abortion is kind of settled in one way or another at this

01:13:16.680 point. It's now a state's rights issue, but most states haven't gotten rid of it. And that's kind

01:13:21.120 of just the equilibrium that now exists there. Things like trans kids and, you know, that kind 1.00

01:13:26.740 of stuff has become very unpopular. So they need to find a way to get back to this abundance 1.00

01:13:30.700 discussion, the economic discussion, that kind of thing. And AI data centers is exactly the kind

01:13:36.780 of thing that they can use to do that. So I think if nothing else, it would be very wise if

01:13:41.600 Republicans are going to back this and do so full throatedly, they consider how best to counter that

01:13:47.740 or position that. I think they should just probably not do that. But if they're going to do that,

01:13:52.480 they should be considering strategically how to maneuver that, because I think that will

01:13:56.600 ultimately be an issue that while probably won't be in and of itself entirely determinative of the

01:14:01.840 election will have a bigger impact than people realize as we go forward all right guys well

01:14:08.440 thank you once again for stopping by and asking questions it's been fantastic talking about this

01:14:14.140 with mr millerman and again you should make sure that you're checking out his work if it's your

01:14:18.940 first time on this channel you need to click the subscribe the like the bell all the notifications

01:14:23.580 they help with the algorithm get things out to people and help you know when we go live if you

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01:14:31.740 your favorite podcast platform. Thank you, everybody, for watching. And as always, I will

01:14:35.400 talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 01, 2026

Heidegger's Warning About Technology ｜ Guest： Michael Millerman ｜ 6⧸1⧸26

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