Martin Heidegger and Günther Anders on Technology: On Ray Kurzweil, Fritz Lang, and Transhumanism

This piece was originally published in Volume 1 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College.

All mere chasing after the future so as to work out a picture of it through calculation in order to extend what is present and half thought into what, now veiled, is yet to come, itself still moves within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological calculating representation.

- Martin Heidegger, The Turning

When I first heard Ray Kurzweil speak on the technological singularity at Bard College at a conference Roger Berkowitz organized there, I was immediately put in mind of an old science cartoon (which I just as immediately popped into my PowerPoint for my own talk). The cartoon may be the most famous of Stanley Harris’ many science cartoons, and it stars two scientists, an old one and a vaguely younger one who has written a row of numbers and figures across a blackboard, with the phrase THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS, followed by more equations. The older guy has the punch line (today the older one would never be a know-it-all, you need a ten year old for that, thus speaketh Hollywood): “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”