Minding the Shift: Some Thoughts on the Human and Not Too Human Mind

Software systems that claim to think for themselves may prove to be Frankenstein’s nightmare come true. When Amazon used algorithms to read digital letters of job applicants, it turned out that mentioning women sports in the category of one’s favourite leisure activities was detrimental to getting the job, i.e., the algorithm favoured male applicants. What if AI becomes able to and will in fact take over cars, elevators and other electronic devices with devastating results for their human owners or operators? In this article, I aim to address the differences between, and the possible clashes of the human and the AI minds (and their souls and hearts) by means of some examples, including a.o., drones, ADS (automatic driving systems) and our recent Artificial Friend, Kazuo Ishiguro’s fictional robot Klara, and I do so by focussing on the narratives involved, on the view that new technologies need a legal hermeneut. This article is inspired, firstly, by the novelist Samuel Butler and the today not so fictional question that he raised, i.e., whether “because mechanical life is a very different thing from ours, therefore it is not life at all?” (Samuel Butler, Erewhon [1872]. Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1954, 175), because Butler adds that if it is considered life it could have a will of its own as well and that may lead to dire consequences also from a point of view of law; secondly, because the topic of AI also invites us to consider the interdisciplinary question why new technologies need the humanities. As the philosopher Edmund Husserl claimed, a determination of the world by the positive sciences as took place in the second half of the nineteenth century occasioned “an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people” (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy [1954], trans. David Carr. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970, 6).