The Great AI Debate:
The following is a part of our ongoing blog series, “The Great AI Debate,” in preparation for New Polity’s event on AI in the Spring of 2027. For more on AI, please see our two magazines Issue 6.2/3 and Issue 7.3.
If the universe is billions of years old and teeming with stars and planets, where is everybody? Statistically, extraterrestrial civilizations should be common, yet we’ve seen no evidence—no alien signals, artifacts, or visits. Our strange loneliness in the cosmos gets called “Fermi’s paradox,” and its proposed solutions range from “We’re alone” (rare-Earth hypothesis) to “They’re hiding” (zoo hypothesis) or “They self-destructed” (great filter theory). This last solution fuels existential dread and sci-fi dreams the world over. It proposes that civilizations do not spread across the stars and meet us because the same technological development which would allow them to do so also allows them to destroy themselves. Even if only a tiny minority of the inhabitants tend towards self-destruction or are prone to take risks, sooner or later one of them uses the opportunity afforded by their technology... and thus they are “filtered” out. Are we not at precisely such a moment? We exerted our domination over our natural environment to such a degree that we are making Earth uninhabitable for us. We developed arms of mass destruction which, if deployed, will annihilate not just our enemies but all of us. And we created “Artificial Intelligence” which threatens to totally control us and erase what makes us human.
Aakash Singh Rathore’s forthcoming book Will AI Murder Us All?[1] is focused on this single question: how, if at all, can we—humanity—avoid being filtered? He describes our predicament with ruthless cruelty, dismissing all easy, humanist excuses: “A future AI, if it surpasses us more broadly, might leave human cognition in the dust—not maliciously…but precisely by being better at being less human.” [2]
How will AI agents with “intelligence” far surpassing humans relate to humanity? More precisely, how will they relate to the morality that characterizes us humans? The first idea that comes to mind here is, of course, that AI agents will have (and already have) no morality: notions like guilt and responsibility are foreign to them, and they simply follow whatever moral rules their programmer implants in them. Another option is that AI agents will function like Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Overman). Singh is right to point out that the Overman does not further or develop our own moral values, rather
the Overman creates its own new values and is willing to do exactly the opposite of what tradition dictates, if it means discovering new possibilities. Viewed in that way, superintelligent AI may not be a danger to morality so much as a possibly welcome transvaluation of morality: a phenomenon that changes what it means to be excellent, creative or virtuous. Modern AI discourse—from Elon Musk’s articulation of ‘godlike’ artificial minds to Peter Thiel’s dismissal of democratic constraints on technological power—perfectly captures this Nietzschean sensibility: the future belongs not to those who conserve inherited morality, but to those who risk all in order to transcend it.[3]
Singh convincingly rejects this Nietzschean reading, listing two counter-arguments. First, AI agents may end up obeying their own “morality”, one that we humans will not be able to identify or even understand:
An AI might reason about suffering, fairness or future value in ways that are internally coherent to it, but utterly alien to human moral intuition. The gap in such a case would not be one of intelligence but of moral legibility. At this point of moral singularity, humans would find themselves facing a paradox: we would directly or indirectly be at the mercy of a system whose ethical judgements we cannot assess, yet whose power we cannot resist. In this case, superintelligence would not guarantee super-morality, but it might instead produce total moral opacity.[4]
Singh’s second reason is even more interesting and relevant: Thiel and Musk may think of themselves as “creative supermen” leaving behind the common mass of people, but “the danger or the seduction of AI is not necessarily that it will supersede our existing and outdated morality, but that it will harden our tendencies toward conformity and herd behaviour.”[5] Thiel’s world is not a world of droid-overmen-overlords but a world of “banal corporate androids animated by the hive mind, slave robotic labour feeding corporate bottom lines....”[6] This world is as far as possible from what Nietzsche had in mind: a new world of exceptional individuals leading a passionate, intense life full of risks, outside of any universal moral norms.
Singh locates the threat posed by AI not in technology as such but in the social relations within which AI machines are produced: it is the capitalist universe which prevents us from breaking out of the destructive logic of the prisoner’s dilemma. Although we rationally know that solidarity and collaboration are better for all participants, the capitalist focus on profit privileges distrust of others—it perceives others as potential threats who will use our trust as an excuse to attack us even more brutally. The basic perversion of capitalism is that it is not even authentically egoist: what matters is not just that I win but even more that my opponent loses, so that I prefer losing a little bit (if my opponent loses more) to my winning a little bit. Here we have envy and resentment which cannot be dismissed as subjective aspects of an alienated social order—they are a constitutive moment of human desire as such, clearly discernible even in leftist projects of equality and solidarity which often rely on the premise that I am ready to suffer only if others also suffer.
How are we to break out of this vicious cycle? Apart from a general sympathy for Buddhism, Singh refers, on this point, to Donna Haraway who, four decades ago, wrote her “Cyborg Manifesto.”[7] Haraway located the emancipatory potential of cyborgs in the very feature most of us perceived as a mortal threat to our being-human: we should leave behind any anti-technological nostalgia for old “authentic” ways of being and joyfully assume that our lives, up to our most intimate feelings, are inextricably intermingled with technology. In a quite literal way we are already cyborgs, incorporating into our bodies technological components without which we would not survive. “Artificial Intelligence” is just another much more powerful technological supplement without which our entire social life would collapse. In their very existence, cyborgs interrupt the logic of parental succession—they are an
“illegitimate offspring,” born not of love or emancipation but emerging from domination: militarism, patriarchal capitalism, state socialism, war technologies, bureaucratic control, industrial discipline and systems designed to manage bodies and populations. The cyborg is a byproduct of violence and exploitation.[8]
Such a practice of repurposing (or “ex-aptation,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s term) uses technologies generated by oppressive systems against these systems themselves:
This is a profound reorientation of how we think about technological inheritance. Where traditional political theory—and here we can even include Gandhi and his vilification of technological modernity—worries about corruption and degradation (how good intentions are spoiled by bad systems), the cyborg weaponizes the instability of its originating systems, thus prying open new, epic opportunities.[9]
But could our “decentering” by the AI machinery be transformed into a new order in which we humans will still be able to reprogram our AI partner so that it will act with care and empathy? We can see why Haraway soon abandoned her dream of cyborg: the gap that separates the human and the AI portion of a cyborg is too strong. An AI agent does not just learn data and reason far faster than a human mind. A human mind is embodied, exposed to pain and vulnerability, prone to doubt and oscillations, caught in an intersubjective network of others as impenetrable to themselves as to the human mind interacting with them. This, in clear contrast to an AI agent: a smoothly-functioning machine doing its job without compassion or pain. It is difficult to imagine a community of cyborgs programming the AI part of themselves in such a way that it would follow the logic of humanist care and solidarity. The gap that separates AI from the human mind is not just quantitative but qualitative.
So where does Singh see some hope (if not a solution)? His basic premise is that it is not enough to fight for new ethical values that would motivate us to act for global justice: whatever its content, the very form of such an approach reproduces domination and exclusion. As it was the case with Buddha, our starting point should not be global principles but the concrete experience of suffering, humiliation, and exploitation we see around ourselves. While suffering is part of being human, today this vulnerability is exacerbated by three factors: the tradition of colonialism which survives in an obfuscated form in our modernity; European modernity which presents itself as a bearer of equality and justice but uses this ideological frame as a tool which strengthens exploitation, oppression of women, and new forms of colonialism; and last, but not least, the explosive growth of Artificial Intelligence which controls us precisely when we experience ourselves as free. To see this, it is not enough to proceed in the usual mode: a critique of ideology that brings out the immanent inconsistencies and exclusions of modern universalism. What we should focus on: How do these three factors structure our daily life? How do we experience their effects in our daily suffering and disorientation? With regard to AI: What does it mean for an ordinary citizen to live in a world regulated by AI? How does AI make it possible that those in power know us better than we know ourselves, and how does it predetermine our desires and choices?
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.
Notes
Aakash Singh Rathore, Will AI Murder Us All?: The Moral Psychology of Artificial Intelligence (Penguin Random House India, 2026).
Ibid., xiv.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 151.
Ibid., 152.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 155.
Ibid., 158.
Aakash Singh Rathore, Will AI Murder Us All?, 187.