The Habermas Machine
Have you heard of the Habermas Machine?
In fact, have you heard of Jürgen Habermas? Still with us, and like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, he is one of the mighty antique philosophers of our time. MacIntyre is 96, Habermas is 95 and Taylor is 93. I was just in a Comprehensive Exam for a Ph.D. student and one of the examiners mentioned all three names. Well! It’s the zeitgeist. No one half that age is at all well known. But we are all familiar with our ancients. Alain Badiou is 88. Georgio Agamben, that hero of COVID-19, is a mere stripling at 82.
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Might be useful in a marriage.
Eh? What? And take all the fun out of life. Yes dear…
My favourite one is the Useless Machine.https://youtu.be/mqvh3R8nKSA
I think the Hobbes Machine is already up and running, and ticking away like a well-maintained engine.
My favourite is “The Machine Stops” by E M Forster…a chilling tale that is coming closer to truth for comfort.
Pomerantsev:
By “better” he means that everyone ought to agree with him and people that don’t are Literally Hitler.
Who needs objective truth when AI generated consensus gives us all the answers we may ever need?
Are we in the process of making God?
I propose another: A Nietzsche machine — will tell everybody who criticizes its outputs that he’s simply too daft to understand them and will tell everybody who approves of them that this shows that he’s simply too daft to be worthy of having seen them.
This machine will further human understanding by becoming the universal enemy everybody loathes.