The new era of Technology Mysticism: Generative Artificial Intelligence and its effects

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) started to disrupt many application areas in the domain of information technology and is developing at a rapid pace. GenAI exhibits different systemic characteristics, it is a trained technology as opposed to the engineered technologies that have been developed in the IT domain in the past. As trained technologies are heavily depending on huge amounts of training data, their behaviour is not deterministic but of a stochastic nature, leading to a limited understanding of those systems. their behaviour is emergent. Assumptions and beliefs in the abilities of technologies by their users create a new age of mysticism that can be compared with our past and the relation of people in medieval times to the age of Mysticism with respect to their understanding of nature and their surroundings. We are facing AI today like our ancestors faced incomprehensible natural phenomena. This article is discussing the resulting effects from a technical but also from a philosophical perspective.