Artificial intelligence, calculative reason, and technical domination: lessons from Husserl, Heidegger, and Marcuse

Abstract The run on artificial intelligence (AI) is also a race for rendering world and mind calculable. As has recently been observed, the ultimate goal of Silicon Valley and its copycats is ‘to capture the planet in a computationally legible form’ (Crawford 2021). This endeavor and thus contemporary forms of AI, as revolutionary as they may seem, are not entirely new; in fact, machine learning algorithms and generative AI are only the newest expression of a drive towards mathematization and control whose origins reach back to antiquity. This paper redirects and re-actualizes the phenomenological analyses of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to bring into relief the genealogical origins and the attitudinal patterns underlying contemporary AI and the calculative thinking that it embodies. With Husserl, we see that the technology is a tool to mathematize the world. Moreover, Heidegger shows how contemporary AI becomes both expression and tool for a (self-)alienating thirst for domination that reduces human beings themselves to mere ‘stock’, ready to be controlled, computed, and exploited. Yet, drawing on these two authors does not suffice to fathom AI’s sociotechnical embeddedness. Instead, following Herbert Marcuse, it is necessary to reveal calculative reason’s relation to capitalist modes of production. These insight into AI’s socio-historical conditions of possibility is crucial. Technology is never purely scientific nor technical; it is an inherently political matter. As such, it also requires a political response—even from academics.