Kant & AI; Jaron Lanier on breaking our "allegiance to humans"

...the advance of A.I. technology may soon put an end to our species' monopoly on mind. If computers can think, does that mean that they are also free moral agents, worthy of dignity and rights? Or does it mean, on the contrary, that human minds were never as free as Kant believed—that we are just biological machines that flatter ourselves by thinking we are something more? And if fundamental features of the world like time and space are creations of the human mind, as Kant argued, could artificial minds inhabit entirely different realities, built on different principles, that we will never fully understand? These kinds of questions are discussed in the 2022 anthology "Kant and Artificial Intelligence," in which one contributor observes, "You can easily get the impression that much of contemporary cognitive science is heavily influenced by Kant's philosophy."

Of course, it is impossible to draw a straight line from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, or to say with certainty what Kant would have thought about Ukraine or ChatGPT. As Willaschek writes, "Kant does not offer any ready-made solutions to the questions of our age." But what makes a philosopher great isn't that they have all the answers; it is that they help us formulate our most important questions, even ones that they could never have anticipated. Kant, Willaschek says, "challenges us to critically examine them for ourselves and form our own judgment." Perhaps the Kantian idea hardest to accept today is his confidence that humanity is able to do such difficult things, and wants to. ■

New Yorker nov3 '25

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Your A.I. Lover Will Change You

Jaron Lanier, VR pioneer and author of "You Are Not A Gadget," says you're still not.

"...Why work on something that you believe to be doomsday technology? We speak as if we are the last and smartest generation of bright, technical humans. We will make the game up for all future humans or the A.I.s that replace us. But, if our design priority is to make A.I. pass as a creature instead of as a tool, are we not deliberately increasing the chances that we will not understand it? Isn't that the core danger?

Most of my friends in the A.I. world are unquestionably sweet and well intentioned. It is common to be at a table of A.I. researchers who devote their days to pursuing better medical outcomes or new materials to improve the energy cycle, and then someone will say something that strikes me as crazy. One idea floating around at A.I. conferences is that parents of human children are infected with a "mind virus" that causes them to be unduly committed to the species. The alternative proposed to avoid such a fate is to wait a short while to have children, because soon it will be possible to have A.I. babies. This is said to be the more ethical path, because A.I. will be crucial to any potential human survival. In other words, explicit allegiance to humans has become effectively antihuman. I have noticed that this position is usually held by young men attempting to delay starting families, and that the argument can fall flat with their human romantic partners..."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/your-ai-lover-will-change-you