Myth, Angst, and AI: Towards a Neo-Blumenbergian Framework for Understanding How We Think About Technology

Abstract AI is often called a ‘myth’, in the sense that there is a gap between the promises and the actual technology. But there are deeper and more productive connections between myth and AI, and more generally, myth and technology. This paper argues that myths are important ways in which cultures make sense of technology and that studying and working on myths is needed for critically evaluating our relation to AI. It supports this claim (1) by establishing a basis for the importance of myth vis-à-vis technology in a revised version of Blumenberg’s existentialist philosophical anthropology that sees myth as a response to what I call ‘the absolutism of technology’ and (2) by showing how thinking about AI is structured and shaped by creation myths and how difficult it is to go beyond them. This not only offers some building blocks for a framework for critical analysis for contemporary debates about AI in terms of myths but also invites us to reflect on the limits of our thinking about technology in general.