Artificial Intelligence and Its Integration into the Human Lifeworld

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing yet much misunderstood technology. Vastly different definitions of AI, ranging from AI as a mere tool to an intelligent being, give rise to contradicting assessments of the possibilities and dangers of AI. A clearer concept of AI is needed to come to a better understanding of the possibilities of responsible governance of AI. In particular, the relation of AI to the world we live in needs to be clarified. This chapter shows that AI integrates into the human lifeworld much more thoroughly than other technology, and that the integration needs to be understood within a wider picture. The reasons for the unclear concept of AI do not merely lie in AI’s novelty, but also in the fact that it is an extraordinary technology. This chapter will take a fresh look at the unique nature of AI. The concept of AI here is restricted to computational systems: hardand software that make up devices and applications which may but do not usually resemble humans. This chapter rejects the common assumption that AI is necessarily a simulation or even replication of humans or of human capacities and explains that what distinguishes AI from other technologies is rather its special relation to the world we live in. The world we live in includes ordinary physical nature, which humans have been extensively changing with the help of technology – in constructive and in destructive ways. Human life is constantly becoming more bound to technology, up to the degree that the consequences of the use of technology threaten the most fundamental conditions of life on earth. Even small conveniences provided by technology, such as taking a car or plane instead of a bicycle or public transportation, matter more to most of us than the environmental damage they cause. Our dependence on technology has become so self-evident that a standard answer to the problems caused by technology is that they will be taken care of by future technology. Technology is not only changing the physical world, however, and this chapter elaborates why this is especially true for AI. The world we live in is also what philosophers since Edmund