Artificial Intelligence and the 2500-year-old project called Europe – Tobias Rees

About the Lecture

AI provincializes Europe. Not only economically and geopolitically (which will be addressed). But also, and much more fundamentally, philosophically. For Europe is not merely a geographical designation – but also, decisively, a philosophical project. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the project of Europe is essentially identical with the project of philosophy that emerged 2,500 years ago – with the invention (Parmenides) of the concepts of Thinking and Being.

This philosophical project has been grounded in a series of concepts –singular concepts that must not be mistaken for universals – which, despite many minor and major ruptures, have continuously evolved: Human, Nature, Reason, Geist, Consciousness, Art, Society, Technology – these concepts are not universals but inventions and achievements. Together they form the gedankliche Zusammenhänge that define Europe to this day.

And AI?
AI is incompatible with these gedankliche Zusammenhänge:
It runs diagonal to them and defies the logical assumptions that have rendered them stable –– for instance, that things are either living or not, either human or machine.

AI is, for Europe, a philosophical earthquake of magnitude 11 out of 10. It releases us into an Elsewhere for which we lack the concepts necessary for orientation. And precisely therein, in the radical provincialization of Europe, lies the possibility that AI represents for Europe.
The subject of this talk is to make this possibility visible.

Video Recording

About the Speaker

Tobias Rees was professor at prestigious research universities in Switzerland, Canada, and the US. He left academia because he thinks that it is the material infrastructure of the 19th century and as such an obstacle to radical research in the philosophical newness that defines our time. He therefore founded limn, an AI studio at the intersection of philosophy, art, and technology, and now refers to himself as a “Philosopher in the Wild”.