FREE FROM US

GEORG DIEZ

Writer, journalist, Spiegel Online; former cultural editor, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Die Zeit

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The thinking machine, Turing’s turmoil: Does it really change everything? It is, after all, a human folly to believe that this is how things work—that a single event can separate time, man, thinking. A self-negating and at the same time self-elevating sentimentality, both optimistic and pessimistic, nihilistic and idealistic.

Because, really, what does it mean? And who’s to judge? What is “everything”? And what is “change”? What is before and what is after? We’d first have to agree about the state of affairs, and that itself is difficult enough. Are we free, for example? And free from what? Is biology a system that allows for freedom? To a certain degree, yes. Is democracy a system that allows for freedom? Yes, but only theoretically sometimes, and tragically less and less so. Is capitalism a system that allows for freedom? Not for everybody, that’s for sure.

So is freedom, after all, the right approach, the right thing to ask for? Yes, if domination is what we fear from thinking machines. But should this be the way we think about thinking machines? Is negativity equal to critical thinking? Is critical thinking the right way to produce some real insight? Or is this onanistic logic, meant to please ourselves without regard for others and the outside world? Who are we addressing in such a critical way? People we’d like to convince? Is that possible? Or is it a chimera? A strange turn of reason, the conceit of the “enlightened” community?

Not that progress isn’t possible. Quite the contrary, and thinking machines speak to this. Maybe the idea of progress itself isn’t necessarily tied to the idea of humanity. Maybe humans aren’t the eternal carrier of this idea. Maybe the idea will eventually detach itself from humans and develop its own reality. Maybe this is what the thinking machine is all about: a difference, a mirror, a chance to reflect. Free from us. Free from the burden of humanity and history.

Human history is in large part the piling of mythology upon mythology—and then of the strenuous effort to unravel the lot, straighten it out, get it right again. It’s as if we’d set up barricades purely in order to remove them, to give us a sense of meaning, of purpose. That was ridiculous, like so much we humans do. So to think about machines means to think about humans less as humans. Which sets us free from all the old lore in which we’ve been caught up—old concepts of order, life, happiness.

Family, friendship, sex, money—everything could be different. Those aren’t the only possible answers to the question of human freedom and how to create it—and more important, how to constrain it. The thinking machine is the necessary question mark behind our existence. It’s a blank space, just like everybody’s life. It offers the possibility of freeing us from our evolutionary, psychological, neurological assumptions. In a truly antihumanistic humanistic sense, in the romantic tradition of E. T. A. Hoffmann, this could be a poetic and thus a political proposition.

It could free us from us.