There is a risk of more than ten per cent that AI will wipe out humanity within ten years, according to leading AI safety experts. But AI is unlikely to be regulated.
Firstly, the benefits are too great. AI can cure diseases such as cancer and dramatically increase productivity.
Furthermore, game theory and the security dilemma show that businesses and states will not regulate AI for fear that their rivals will not do so either. And if one regulates unilaterally, one finds oneself in a far worse position, where the opposing party will dominate one with catastrophic consequences. Businesses and states risk being wiped out.
The fact that there appears to be no way out of the technology’s domination was what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger meant when, exactly 60 years ago, he told Der Spiegel magazine that ‘only a god can save us’.
But what did the master thinker mean by this enigmatic statement? And what significance does it have for AI?
Everything works, and that is precisely what is so unsettling
Der Spiegel interviewed Heidegger in 1966, ten years before the interview was published. Heidegger had in fact stipulated that it should only be published after his death, which occurred exactly five days later.
As in his works, it is clear from the interview that Heidegger believes technology shapes our age more than anything else, and that this is an existential problem.
To which Der Spiegel’s journalists naively object: ‘What are we actually missing? Power stations are being built, production is increasing, prosperity and welfare are skyrocketing. People are, after all, doing really well.
Heidegger replies that this is precisely what is so unsettling. Everything works, and this functionality drives everything towards even greater functionality; the triumph of functionality is complete. Heidegger recounts the first time he saw the photographs of the Earth taken from the Moon, and how they shocked him.
‘We don’t need any atomic bombs,’ he says. Humanity’s rootlessness has already set in. All relationships have become technical. Humanity no longer lives on the earth.
In Provence, launch pads for nuclear weapons are being built, says Heidegger – today we can add to this list satellite constellations, wind turbines, solar panels, mining operations and data centres – and the landscape is being laid waste. Rootlessness is humanity’s final destination, unless thought and poetry regain their liberating power.
Technology is not a tool
Der Spiegel uses the sorcerer’s apprentice as a metaphor to illustrate that humans are never entirely in control of their tools, and goes on to ask whether it is not a little too pessimistic to say that we cannot master modern technology at all.
Heidegger dismisses the question. Pessimism and optimism do not go far enough, for modern technology is not a tool at all. Instead, humankind is challenged by a power that manifests itself in the very nature of technology, and it is a power that humankind does not itself control. This brings to mind Paul Kingsnorth’s idea of the machine giving birth to the AI demon.
Technology is a movement that encompasses the entire globe, and here Heidegger points to communism and Americanism as manifestations of this. For my part, I would say that precisely these two ideologies – communism and liberalism – share many fundamental assumptions, particularly the belief in progress and the emphasis on the humanist dogma of humanity’s shaping of reality.
Heidegger refers to the proposed solutions, such as democracy and constitutional rights, as ‘half-solutions’. They are based precisely on the notion that humankind holds technology in its own hands. And that is not possible, he argues.
In the current AI debate, the techno-optimists similarly believe that we can control the machine by letting it run, whilst the regulatory optimists believe we can control it by putting the brakes on. Both camps share the same delusion: that humankind is in control.
Only a god can save us
If not communism and liberalism, then what? Here, Heidegger’s radical conservatism becomes clear – or as clear as it can possibly be for such an elusive thinker.
‘Only a god can save us,’ he says cryptically. We cannot conceive of God, but at most awaken a readiness through thought and poetry (the German Romantic Hölderlin is Heidegger’s recurring example).
The spirit must create a readiness for the coming of God or for God’s absence in the face of ruin. Even the experience of absence is not nothing, says Heidegger, for it frees humanity from losing itself in things.
The God Heidegger has in mind may be the Christian God – Heidegger was brought up as a Catholic – but this is uncertain; perhaps it is not even a personal God, but rather the sacred, as in Hölderlin and the gods of the pre-Socratic Greeks.
In any case, philosophy has reached the end of the road with Nietzsche, says Heidegger. ‘What takes its place?’ asks Der Spiegel, and Heidegger replies with a single word: cybernetics. In future, the world will be understood as a system to be measured, controlled and optimised.
These are prophetic words spoken in 1966. Read in 2026, they sound like the artificial world we are heading into, where machines control machines.
Roots rather than salvation
Heidegger, however, rejects the notion that technology is an inescapable and inevitable fate.
The task of thought is to help humankind establish a free relationship with the essence of technology, and here Heidegger draws on ancient notions of a home. Everything great has come into being because humankind had a home and was rooted in a tradition.
The reversal can only be prepared where the technical world arose, that is, through the European tradition and a renewed appropriation of it. Thinking is precisely not passivity, he says; it is an engagement in dialogue with the times.
We cannot come any closer to a definition, for that would turn thinking into technology. That is probably also why Heidegger holds poetry in such high regard, for poetry is precisely a completely different form of expression, liberated from the dominant logics of the Enlightenment and rationality.
And artificial intelligence? We can hardly stop the race, but we can hold on to what the machine cannot provide.
