This insight resonates with a note I posted three days ago. I agree completely with the moral point you are making:
Modern innovation, as it is promulgated by the tech industry, is not innovation. It is trapped within its own cosmological construct of necessity, where the future is treated as inevitable and human beings are asked only to adapt. But this denies the responsibility required in the radically contingent world we actually live in, where innovation, in its original sense, is necessary.
In this sense, the modern technological time we inhabit, and the ethos that corresponds to it, is not an ethos of engagement in the sense of technē, with its demand for phronēsis. It is an ethos of withdrawal. That is, an abdication of responsible action.
This abdication requires the silencing of artists, because the artist practicing technē keeps contingency knowable. The silencing occurs when technē is recast as epistēmē. If art is treated as that which must be, because it has always been, rather than as a making that could be otherwise, it ceases to be art as such. It is absorbed into the ethos of necessity, where moral agency has no place.
Generative AI “art,” in all its manifestations, is the engine of this reduction. Moral agency is denied epistemic validity, technē is collapsed into efficient process, and the artist as such is reduced to a nullity.
It sounds like a great read.
Bravo! You have identified the key issue! THANK YOU !
Need a new senate leader, Schumer is pathetic, the base wants fresh blood, thanks!
Perceptive. But I would argue that this amorality was a significant part of the Cold War launched right after Appomattox.
This insight resonates with a note I posted three days ago. I agree completely with the moral point you are making:
Modern innovation, as it is promulgated by the tech industry, is not innovation. It is trapped within its own cosmological construct of necessity, where the future is treated as inevitable and human beings are asked only to adapt. But this denies the responsibility required in the radically contingent world we actually live in, where innovation, in its original sense, is necessary.
In this sense, the modern technological time we inhabit, and the ethos that corresponds to it, is not an ethos of engagement in the sense of technē, with its demand for phronēsis. It is an ethos of withdrawal. That is, an abdication of responsible action.
This abdication requires the silencing of artists, because the artist practicing technē keeps contingency knowable. The silencing occurs when technē is recast as epistēmē. If art is treated as that which must be, because it has always been, rather than as a making that could be otherwise, it ceases to be art as such. It is absorbed into the ethos of necessity, where moral agency has no place.
Generative AI “art,” in all its manifestations, is the engine of this reduction. Moral agency is denied epistemic validity, technē is collapsed into efficient process, and the artist as such is reduced to a nullity.