AI-Driven Epistemic Monoculture

Description

Nathan Gardels:

"Scharmer’s prime anxiety is what he calls “an emerging epistemic monoculture.” He writes: “Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers and crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture. It manifests in a single computational form of knowing that views the world as a set of objects.”

In this, he follows the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who feared in the 1960s that the integral nature of Being would be extinguished by the advent of cybernetic technologies, in which encompassing feedback loops self-reinforce calculating reason to the exclusion of any spiritual dimension or philosophical frame to elevate or govern it. He worried that what he called the “technicity” of instrumental means with no substantive end would inexorably prevail over the diminished soul."

(https://www.noemamag.com/what-might-the-next-axial-age-look-like/)