Artificial Intelligence: The Essence of Artificial Intelligence; Heidegger and Marx

Prof. Deng Xiaomang- Department of Philosophy, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is a manifestation of technology. Heidegger traces the nature of technology to its etymological meanings, namely art and poetry, in The Question of Technology, which also suggests that the nature of artificial intelligence cannot be understood only from its powerful digital computing functions, and that its instrumentality and artificiality are only an alienated form of its nature, while its true nature is the “deconcealment” ( ἀλήθεια) and “Ereignis” (event ) of human intelligence. Marx’s idea of the alienation of labor reveals the inevitability of this alienation and its philosophical anthropological meaning from the perspective of the critique of national economy, and takes the “conscious activity of life” and the resulting division of labor between mental and material labor as the historical basis for the alienation of human nature. This opens a window for us to understand the alienation phenomenon of AI, and the inquiry into the nature of AI no longer remains in Heideggerian religious mysticism, but enters the historical phenomenological analysis of the origin of human beings. Based on the unity of human nature, i.e., “making, using and carrying tools” and the consciousness and life activities embedded in it, the essence of AI should be understood as the unity of the two links of human nature, i.e., consciousness and life activities, in “artificiality“. The opposition and separation of consciousness and life activity in the nature of human beings is historically inevitable, and the abandonment of this opposition and the return to the integrity of human nature is an eternal goal that human beings cannot give up.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Nature of Technology; Human Origins; Labor Alienation; Division of Labor; Artificiality

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