Every technology has the power to impose its own logic on its unaware users. Are ChatGPT, Claude, Zwilling, Pi or Gemini weaning us of reading, writing and thinking? Are they persuading us to adopt views we don’t even hold? Are they disempowering us by being so eager to serve us? And are they perhaps dangerous precisely because they seem to give us everything we want? Simanowski explores these and other questions with a philosophical sense of how new technology will change the human condition.

We currently encounter artificial intelligence primarily in the form of language machines – computer programs that offer to do the thinking for us. And we are only too happy to accept this offer. With expertise, wit and philosophical depth, Roberto Simanowski demonstrates the possible consequences of this temptation. In an accessible way, he reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of these digital smart alecks and describes the internal momentum of a technology that seemed desirable in science fiction, but whose underpinnings and implications we have never really thought through. He shows that artificial intelligence is not only changing the world; it is also a philosophical project that compels us to carefully rethink ourselves.

Roberto Simanowski, cultural scientist and media philosopher, lives in Rio de Janeiro and Berlin and is the author of 15 books on art, culture and politics in digital media. After holding professorships in the USA, Hong Kong and Switzerland, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the University of Berlin. His book “Todesalgorithmus. Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz” (“The Death Algorithm: The Dilemma of Artificial Intelligence”) was awarded the Tractatus Prize for philosophical essay writing in 2020.