by John Milbank
We live in an age in which politics is no longer simply about the relationship between human beings, but also about the relationship of human beings to the natural world on the one hand and to machines on the other. Perhaps this was always covertly the case and manifestly the case to some degree, but it is now wholly manifest. One aspect of this decisive shift is that natural and social science have come much more into general public contestation.
One approach to this new situation is to insist that what is human be protected from both the natural and the technical. This informs much populist resistance to the claimed control of knowledge and our lives by science, whether we are considering ecological questions or the use of automation and artificial intelligence. Ultimately this resistance is something that is justified: We need to defend human integrity against the claims of both naturalism and robotisation–a drive on the one hand to reduce human beings to animality and on the other hand to approximate them to automatons with which their lives are increasingly intermingled.
But it can become too easy to suppose that the threat to our humanity is nature herself, whose universal tyranny over our poor human aspirations should not be appeased, whatever ecologists may say. Or that it is technology itself , which especially in the mode of AI may land up controlling us, especially if it surpasses a supposed threshold of singularity and becomes itself conscious.