Yuk Hui, computer engineer and one of the most influential contemporary philosophers of technology, photographed at the CCCB in Barcelona last Tuesday. Gianluca Battista
Yuk Hui, one of the most influential philosophers of technology in AI debates, also uses ChatGPT.
“Immanuel Kant writes very long sentences in German, with hardly any punctuation, and it can be very confusing, so I ask him to put periods and commas, to separate ideas, and he does it much better than me,” he explains in a small room at the Center. of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, where he gave a conference.
On Thursday he was also at Tabakalera in San Sebastián, a city where he hoped to “eat very well.”
Born in Hong Kong, he never says how old he is.
Because of his sober style—high collar, black jacket, minimal glasses—and his wise man's gaze, which at the same time lights up with curiosity, it would be impossible to guess her.
He studied Computer Engineering, but the questions he asked himself pushed him towards Philosophy.
He received his PhD from Goldsmiths College, London under the supervision of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, and now teaches at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
He has published several books, translated into a dozen languages.
In Spanish,
On the existence of digital objects
(Dark Matter),
Fragmenting the future
and
Recursivity and contingency
(both in Caja Negra, where he will soon also publish
The question of technique in China).
His view on artificial intelligence is far from the hegemonic vision, that he expects this technology to progress so much that it either frees us from work or brings about the apocalypse.
Influenced by Gilbert Simondon, Martin Heidegger, Henri Bergson and the cybernetic science promoted in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener, he tries to understand how our relationship with technology works and defends a vision that takes into account the diversity of forms of knowledge of each culture.
ASK.
How did you go from computer science to philosophy?
ANSWER.
I studied in Hong Kong, and I was fascinated by artificial intelligence.
I realized that the questions are philosophical: what is perception?
What is an action?
What is morality?
If a robot enters this room it sees us, but how can it know what is important about what it sees?
This led me to the phenomenological critique of artificial intelligence that began in the 1960s.
An American philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, said that the AI that was being developed at MIT was Cartesian, and that this was a mistake, it was already surpassed in the history of philosophy.
He proposed a Heideggerian artificial intelligence.
Q.
And what does it mean?
A.
It is an artificial intelligence that is embodied: it embodies the world and is inserted in the world.
Dreyfus said that those who developed AI were not fully understanding what intelligence or the basic experience of life is.
As an Engineering student, I understood that you learn a dogma, a way of programming, but you don't know what is really happening.
Now I think things have changed.
Q.
They have also accelerated.
In his essays, seven years ago he quoted a phrase from Putin: “Whoever leads artificial intelligence will control the world.”
Where are we now?
A.
Before Putin it was Xi Jinping who said it.
And last week it was Emmanuel Macron who said that Europe is slow in this regard.
So we are in a competition for AI.
But where does this race lead?
Right now, toward what transhumanists call the technological singularity, a single superintelligence with which we imagine we will no longer need governments.
This narrative is almost like that of the apocalypse: we are moving towards a place we do not know.
I propose moving towards technological diversity, diversity of thought, biodiversity.
It is the alternative to the apocalypse.
Q.
Technology companies also exploit this apocalyptic narrative.
A.
AI right now is not just technology, it is a way of financing, a tool to attract investments.
This fear they appeal to is what they have to say to justify what they do and attract investment.
“Humans are technological beings.
“We invent technology, but it in turn invents us.”
Q.
With the tension in the world, for example in Taiwan, can this competition lead to war?
A.
I analyze this precisely in my next book,
Machine and Sovereignty
.
What is the relationship between technology and war?
Of course, technology is used in war, but it is not that simple.
I analyze a 1914 speech by philosopher Henri Bergson, just after the outbreak of war.
He says that each of the machines created in Europe in the previous 100 years was like an organ for humans: the artificial body expanded, but we didn't know how to deal with it.
For him, this is the cause of the war.
Greek hubris
could not be pacified
.
We see it now in the reactionary movement in Russia, with Alexander Dugin and his narrative that Russia has been repressed by the West also in terms of technology and science.
Q.
You write about the paradox of intelligence: it produces tools that can threaten it.
Is it constitutive of human evolution?
A.
Humans are technological beings.
We invent technology, but it in turn invents us: it develops our gestures, reconfigures our central nervous system... And technological evolution goes much faster than biological evolution.
Before the industrial revolution, the craftsman had a series of tools, which he could organize.
With the Enlightenment came larger factories, but people still worked manually.
With the industrial revolution, Marx described autonomous machines: workers put in material at the beginning and collect the result at the end.
Their bodies are not used as before, they lose their consciousness.
The machine is a pure externalization of intelligence, but humans do not know how to treat it: it is one of the sources of alienation.
Now we confront a type of machine that is almost biological, and I mean almost.
It comes from the development of cybernetics, proposed in the 1940s: machines adjust themselves, they are reflective.
Q.
How to think about technology from other places?
A.
It is what I call technodiversity.
I am not referring to the defense of the local and the traditional that the right does.
It has nothing to do with identity, but with the fact that each locality has a form and history of knowledge.
With modernization, these forms became fragile: indigenous knowledge cannot be used to make a machine.
It's not about preserving local knowledge in a museum, it's about understanding how it is relevant to what we do today, how it helps resituate technology.
We cannot let economic reason and individualism dominate our use of technology, let us study other ways to develop alternatives that serve the community.
Q.
Can art play a role in this issue?
A.
In the last century, art was already pressured by technological determinism.
In
The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility
, Walter Benjamin said that we should not ask whether film and photography are art, but rather how the nature of art is transformed by technology.
This continues today: art, business, everything is transformed with artificial intelligence.
My proposal is that we think, through technological diversity and artistic varieties, how our experience on Earth can help us transform technology.
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