What would Gunther say?

The prognosis for the future continues to deteriorate as the possibility of “smarter than humans” AI grows ever more likely and the risk of catastrophic harm grows. In this situation, the question of moral responsibility of those in charge also grows more urgent. Unlike the development of nuclear weapons, for example, there is no government agency involved, just a clutch of billionaires, seeking to win a race, regardless of the consequences, and despite multiple warnings that things are not in control. What is their responsibility and how is their moral thinking developing?

In our book we look at two significant instances of moral failure - the Holocaust and the colonial behaviour in the Belgian Congo, as portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. There is another example we could have chosen, the development and deployment of nuclear weapons. In this post we consider the work of one of the world’s most thoughtful antinuclear activists and frame his work and theoretical approach as a way to inform the moral responsibility for advanced artificial intelligence.

Günther Anders was one of the most well-known (in Europe) thinkers about technology and technological change. Born in 1902, Anders was a student of Edmund Husserl (and Heidegger, but that’s a whole other story), and a peer of Herbert Marcuse. In our book we rely on concepts from Marcuse - like instrumental rationality - and I got interested in Anders because of the Marcuse connection, and because there are aspects of his work that resonate with an AI Safety perspective.

Anders was adjacent to, but never a member of, the Frankfurt School. He was married to Hannah Arendt for a few years, after fleeing Germany in 1933, settling in the US until the 1950s. He was a strong antinuclear activist and controversially compared the Holocaust to Hiroshima and argued how the latter was even worse, in part because of the disconnection between those who pushed the button to drop the bomb and their victims.

In terms of the artificial intelligence situation we find ourselves in (or, to be more precise, the situation we have been placed in by AI investors), Anders work contains two points of discussion. The first comes from his major work, Die Antiquierthiet des Menschen (Volume 1 came out in 1956 in German). Only recently published in English (Anders 2025) as The Outdatedness of Human Beings, it has nevertheless been influential in critical theory circles, especially in the last twenty years. Anders’ thesis, that humans are “antiquated” (or no longer needed) resonates even louder now than it did when Anders wrote it. At the time, he was reacting to industrial capitalism and especially remote and industrial warfare (like nuclear weapons). Liessmann frames our outdatedness in this way:

…To this extent we are inverted Utopians: whereas Utopians are unable to make the things they imagine, we are unable to imagine the things we make.’ The perfectibility of technical equipment increasingly exceeds the cognitive and emotional potential of man… Man has to subordinate himself to the needs of technology".(Liessmann 2011, p. 126-129)

Today, with artificial intelligence powered “agent swarms” (Lyons 2026; Hammond 2025), taking actions never contemplated by the humans supposedly directing them, running on data centres that we didn’t agree to have built, the notion that we subordinate ourselves to the needs of the technology is even more poignant.

Christian Fuchs, Jason Dawsey (2017), and Konrad Liessmann have all written insightful and thoughtful reviews of Anders’ work, often grappling with his “confrontation” with Heidegger, but it is Leissmann’s and Fuchs’ treatment of another key concept from Anders’ thought that seems particularly useful when thinking about AI: the promethean gradient (or “gap,” as it is sometimes translated; the word in German is “Gefälle”). Here is Fuchs’ summary

The Promethean gap entails gaps between the relations of production and ideology, production and imagination, doing and feeling, knowledge and conscience, the machine and the body (18), production and needs (19). We are unable to imagine the vast negative consequences that contemporary technologies’ uses can bring about. In the case of catastrophes induced by technologies, we are unable to show grief and remorse because the number of deaths and the extent and intensity of devastation are so excessive. (Fuchs 2021, ch 7.2 )

It’s almost as if we cannot contemplate our own destruction. As John Thornhill put it recently, in the context of discussions about AGI, “A sense of fatalistic inevitability about the technology’s evolution is triggering something close to despair” (Thornhill 2026). This is exactly the kind of thing Anders predicted, calling it a kind of Promethean shame, in which humans prefer what is made (e.g. AI) over the maker (e.g., humans) (Anders 2016, p. 31). Thornhill’s article goes on to relate how in some AI research circles, a kind of quiet acceptance is starting to circulate: should we be focused on creating a worthy successor, as contemplated by Dan Faggella?

For me, in the context of our book, this raises the following question: Can the fear (and for some, the desire) to be replaced by machines/AI be connected to Anders’ concept of feeling shame the we are not (industrial) products? Liessmann states that “One of the central premises of [Anders’] philosophy states: the products of our technical intelligence are more than they appear” (Liessmann 2011) and thus more of a challenge to our continuing existence. Or, in Anders own words:

Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is:“without us!”. (Anders 1981, p.199 translated by Leissmann).

The question then is: are we antiquated? Is our demise/departure inevitable? If not, what can we do about it? Does Anders provide guidance for how to bridge the gap, to take notice and ultimately take responsibility for our creations?

As I was finishing this blog post I found Elke Schwarz’ excellent article Günther Anders in Silicon Valley (Schwarz 2019). Written long before the rise of LLMs and agent swarms, it is remarkably prescient. And, helpfully, it focuses in immediately on this issue of responsibility and consequences. In the abstract to the article, she directs our attention to our responsibilities and developing a moral imagination:

More than half a century ago, Günther Anders sketched out this path toward technological obsolescence, and his work on ‘Promethean shame’ and ‘Promethean discrepancy’ provides an invaluable means with which to recognise and understand the relationship of the modern human to his/her technological products. In this article, I draw on Anders’s writings to unpack and unsettle contemporary narratives of our relation to AI, with a view toward refocusing attention on the responsibilities we bear in producing such immersive technologies. With Anders, I suggest that we must exercise and develop moral imagination so that the human capacity for moral responsibility does not atrophy in our technologically mediated future. (p.94)

Schwarz helpfully returns us to Die Antiquiertheit and lays out the three theses from that work: “1) that we are no match for the perfection of our products, 2) that our scope for producing things outstrips our ability to imagine their impact and take responsibility, and 3) that we seem to assume that it is permissible (if not desirable) to do what we are capable of doing” (Schwartz, .p.96). I can’t think of a better description of the situation with AI today: we are no match for the most advanced models, we are only just barely aware of their implications and dangers, and those building them seem to feel perfectly justified in building more and better models because they can.

Given this situation, what is to be done? Schwarz’s answer is straightforward: “expand one’s moral imagination in order to overcome one’s limited political and moral capacities, with a view to imagining the world we would like to live in with AI, instead of becoming subject to AI logic” (Schwarz 2019, p. 97). In this regard, she echos something we have referenced in our book, going back to an essay on the information society that Leiss wrote in 1990, namely that we are ill served by accepting a state of affairs promulgated by technology companies as being inevitable (Leiss 1990). We should, instead, strive to identify what we want, in this case of artificial intelligence, and then work towards that goal rather than stumbling along a path others have chosen for us, trying to dodge the inevitable pitfalls and perils along the way.

For Anders, getting us to our destination will take more than courage. It will take fear. Schwarz summarizes Anders’s advice in this regard in this way:

In his 1962 ‘Theses for the Atomic Age’, Anders suggests that the imperative ‘Expand your capacity for imagination’ more concretely means ‘Increase your capacity of fear’ (p. 498). This fear, however, is not a conventional, nervous fear. It is a courageous fear, a stirring fear and, importantly, a ‘loving fear, not fear of the danger ahead, but for the generations to come’ (p. 498). Precisely in this resides the possibility for moral responsibility. To wrest our social, political and moral agency from the technological machine world, I suggest, we should exercise our ability to be improper in relation to our technologies, to not acquiesce to the technological economic logic with which we currently shape our socio-politics; to take the magic out of the machines and unveil their immanent power structures and vested interests; to reclaim the body and human soul as a site of strength. This requires courage, vulnerability and love. In his writings and through his actions, G ̈unther Anders has consistently set a valiant example to show that this is indeed possible. (Schwarz 2019, p. 108-109)

It is time to choose, despite or in defiance of the deficiencies in our ability to live up to our responsibilities that Anders has helped us see. It may be that full awareness of our limitations will make the choices more feasible and even more of an achievement. As Joseph de Weck pointed out recently, our discomfort may be the source of our action:

Yet we must not strive to eliminate that lingering feeling of unease. On the contrary, we need to learn to cultivate it. As long as something in us, perhaps the crooked timber of our humanity, recoils from that world, there is hope. Recognising our own self-alienation is to begin resisting it. (de Weck 2026)

I hope he’s right.