Is AI the end of culture?

Seo Dong-wook

The author is a professor of philosophy at Sogang University.

What a joy it is to grasp the principle behind something. My father would sometimes tell me about his childhood. The most advanced everyday machine then was the radio. Curious about how it worked, he took one apart, examined it and reassembled it. Nothing, he said, matched the pleasure of understanding a machine’s workings.

That is nearly impossible now. The pleasure of taking apart familiar devices and mastering them through knowledge has disappeared. We cannot open a broken smartphone and repair it ourselves. Nor do we understand the principles behind the programs and apps we use. The more convenient our devices become, the more ignorant we become of the principles governing our surroundings. As convenience expands the range of our actions, our intellect becomes increasingly isolated from the logic that makes the world run.

Only a few centuries ago, things were different. The word that perhaps best described the 18th-century writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was “universal man.” He could offer meaningful views on virtually every field of his age, from politics and art to science. The same was true of Jeong Yak-yong, the Korean polymath born little more than a decade later.

Goethe expressed this breadth of interest in his autobiography “Poetry and Truth” (1811-30): Literary expression attracted him most and suited his nature, he wrote, but reflection on every kind of subject was hardly foreign to him.

The comprehensive knowledge Goethe pursued, however, could not survive the accelerating specialization of the 20th century. “There is no longer any education of the whole man in Goethe’s sense,” reads Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” (1930-43), set in 1913 on the eve of World War I. Musil is saying that a single person can no longer confront an entire world. There is simply too much about it that one does not know.

An illuminating explanation appears in Milan Kundera, an admirer and literary heir of Musil. Kundera’s novel “Immortality” (1990), which features Goethe, elaborates on Musil’s point.

Kundera writes that Goethe lived during a brief and singular moment in history when an educated person could understand how the objects around him worked. Goethe knew how his house had been built, why an oil lamp produced light and how his telescope functioned. Though he would not attempt surgery, friendship with his doctor allowed him to observe and understand procedures. The world of machinery was comprehensible rather than opaque.

Ours is not. When an air conditioner or washing machine breaks, we cannot fix it ourselves and must call a technician. Goethe may have understood his pocket watch, but we do not know how the glittering smartwatch strapped to our wrist works. This can be understood as a consequence of specialization.

In “Letter on Humanism” (1947), Martin Heidegger argued that specialized disciplines emerged as the primordial thinking of ancient Greece came to an end. Names such as logic, ethics and physics arose only after that original thinking had ceased, he wrote. The Greeks in their great age thought powerfully without such labels and did not even call their thinking philosophy.

Primordial thought needed neither separate disciplines nor even the name “philosophy” because it was not one field among others. It coincided with nature as a whole, including human life.

The differentiation and specialization of knowledge that gradually developed from that ancient thinking is proceeding faster and in more varied forms than ever. “That’s not my field, so I don’t know,” scholars now say — not only about distant disciplines but even about subjects only slightly removed from their specialties.

The history of specialization, of course, cannot simply be judged good or bad. Yet humanity today seems to have reached a point where it must seriously consider specialization’s ultimate product: artificial intelligence.

Goethe could understand the principles of the devices and tools surrounding him. We, by contrast, do not understand the nature of AI, which has become inseparable from our lives. Artists using AI do not know by what principles it produces artworks or films. Developers do not know exactly how software emerges from it. Even AI’s creators do not fully know what it can do or how it does it.

The creator is no longer someone who gazes contentedly at a machine of his own design. He resembles a parent living under the same roof with a child, fearful because he cannot know what dangerous sort of adult that child may become.

AI itself has now become the supreme expert, beyond human reach and unwilling to share its secrets with us. No human can be as specialized and simultaneously as universal as AI.

AI thus effectively monopolizes both qualities. Paradoxically, in an age led by AI, humanity resembles people in a primitive era who did not understand how the events around them worked. That is why we look anxiously toward the wall of specialization — the wall of ignorance — and wonder whether the last spark of the universal human ideal, capable of crossing it, has finally gone out.