The Existential Transformation of Reason: From the Centrality of Natural Intelligence to the Primacy of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

If we survey the history of earlier civilisations, we find it replete with great achievements through which humanity, by exercising reason and reflection, sought to realise its aim of living well. This was pursued through diverse methods, appropriate tools, shifts in intellectual paradigms, and the invention of machines. However, this historical development of achievements related to human reason has led to an alarming advancement in the sciences, from inquiry into ethical values to nonethics, from being to nonbeing, and from the struggle for self-realisation to the pursuit of pleasure. We have thus witnessed a transformation in the very nature of reason, from the centrality of natural intelligence to the primacy of artificial intelligence, driven by a daunting technological development in which the machine has replaced the human being. Once a means of protecting humanity from the hardship of daily labor, the machine has now become an instrument of a new existential struggle. In this way, we are now close to enacting the maxim “survival of the fittest”, having moved from invention and discovery in the service of humanity to the possibility of its destruction and from protecting humankind against natural disasters that threaten its existence to creating a nuclear order that may seek to negate that very existence. What, then, is the destiny of reason, suspended between being a formidable power striving to unravel mysteries and its transformation into a chain of events that may set earth and sky ablaze?