AI, Heidegger, and Evangelion

Unlike obvious automation in spreadsheets or homework grading, which we view as mechanical drudgery and are happy to offload, AI-generated prose attempts to inhabit domains we instinctively associate with authentic subjectivity: observation, memory, yearning, regret. When an LLM “describes the rain” or tries to evoke loneliness at a traffic light, it produces language that looks like the real thing but does not originate in lived experience.

Psychologists and critics (see Sherry Turkle’s work on simulation, or Byung-Chul Han on transparency) suggest that humans crave the recognition of another mind behind communication. The anxiety isn’t about replacement per se, but about a new “algorithmic uncanny valley”: content that teases meaning but never fully arrives at it, leaving us unsettled not because the machine “gets it wrong,” but because there’s no one there to get it at all.

is not the bloody hands of the tyrant at the levers, but the process itself that advances, absent of intention. “In place of intention, we get process.” The algorithm does not conspire; it just runs. Humans hunger for narrative, for intent lurking behind the curtain—heroes and villains. In the church of the algorithm, we encounter an abyss: “There is no one there.” That absence suffocates us more than the prospect of a plotting demon. We want our villains to mean what they do; we are lost before an unfeeling God.

We yearn for something or someone to hold accountable, a focal point for our moral clarity and rage. Today’s technology is a perfect canvas for those projections. The terror is existential. AI shakes the stories we tell about our uniqueness—our creative spark and our sense of agency. Western moral philosophy, from Kant to Nussbaum, revolves around treating humans as ends in themselves, never just means. To reduce a person to a function isn’t just a philosophical error, it cuts at the heart of our dignity.

But Heidegger wasn’t a Luddite. He saw a paradox: technology both reveals and conceals. It produces astonishing new worlds, but only by flattening the world into what can be stored, indexed, and summoned at will. In the digital age, this is literal.

a fear that the territory of the soul, of human meaning, is shrinking. The room for contemplation, leisure, and error is increasingly defined by what resists digitization, until, suddenly, even error is modeled.

Efforts at “interpretable AI,” “explainability,” or algorithmic audits echo Heidegger’s call toward aletheia, the ancient Greek notion of unconcealment, or truth-as-revealing. The contemporary push for AI transparency is, at its best, an effort to reclaim dignity and agency within systems that profit by rendering us invisible to ourselves.

The contemporary push for AI transparency is, at its best, a bid to reclaim dignity and agency within systems that profit by making us invisible to ourselves. But even this may not be enough to address the existential challenge AI poses.

ut he doesn’t ask us to simply retreat, become luddites, or declare defeat in the face of technocratic sprawl. Instead, Heidegger compels us to do something much harder: to see the world as it is being reframed by technology, and then to consciously reclaim or reweave the strands of meaning that risk being flattened.

but by using our awareness—our capacity for critique, ritual, invention, and refusal—to carve out room for messiness, for mourning, for risk, and for deep attention. The saving power is the act of remembering, in the heat of technical progress, to ask: “What space remains for meaning? For art? For wildness, chance, suffering, and genuine encounter?

But perhaps that defensiveness, too, is a signpost. What if the dignity of being human is not to stand forever outside the machine, but to insist, even as the boundaries blur, on those things that remain untranslatable—mess, longing, grief, awe, strangeness?