* The symbiosis of humans and technology portends a new AI-xial Age. By Tobias Rees. https://t.co/DEBfJ8g7Hs "What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura. Let me give a concrete example. One of the most fundamental assumptions of the modern period has been that there is a clear-cut distinction between us humans and machines. Here humans, living organisms; open and evolving; beings that are equipped with intelligence and, thus, with interiority. There machines, lifeless, mechanical things; closed, determined and deterministic systems devoid of intelligence and interiority. This distinction, which first surfaced in the 1630s, was constitutive of the modern notion of what it is to be human. For example, almost the entire vocabulary that was invented between the 17th and 19th centuries to capture what it truly is to be human was grounded in the human/intelligence-machine/mechanism distinction. Agency, art, creativity, consciousness, culture, existence, freedom, history, knowledge, language, morals, play, politics, society, subjectivity, truth, understanding. All of these concepts were introduced with the explicit purpose of providing us with an understanding of what is truly unique human potential, a uniqueness that was grounded in the belief that intelligence is what lifts us above everything else — and that everything else ultimately can be sufficiently described as a closed, determined mechanical system. The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold. What that means is that an epoch that was stable for almost 400 years comes — or appears to come — to an end."