At the beginning of the 20th century, people could presume that we are terrestrial creatures whose habitat is Planet Earth. They could predict that we will continue to live as humans until our far-distant natural demise or an end decreed by God. They could define human beings as creatures who work (homo laborans) and make tools and who understand the tools we’ve made. They could presume that we alone speak and reason in language, unless divine beings also interact with us.
Technology changed all those presumptions. It became clear that we could live on other planets, we could wipe out the species in a few moments, we might be able to automate all work, we might make machines that exceeded our own understanding, and we might build machines that could reason and talk, perhaps better than we do.
Hannah Arendt mentions each of these developments in the Preface to The Human Condition, which she published in 1958. Some of the traditional assumptions about humanity had already collapsed by then, due to atomic weapons and space exploration. So far, there were no machines that could do all our work or think better than we can, but she saw that those developments were coming unless we blew ourselves to dust first. Just five years later, she worried that “electronic ‘brains,’ devised and constructed by men” will “not only do man’s brainwork incomparably better and more swiftly (this, after all, is the outstanding characteristic of all machines), but can do ‘what a human brain cannot comprehend” (Arendt 1963, 530.)
She therefore posed the question: what is the human condition? She wanted readers to consider what is essential to us. This is what must be preserved if we love humankind. For her, love of our species was not contingent on our being excellent in some way–for example, the best thinkers on the planet. It was a fundamental ethic.
Clearly, human life will end if we vaporize ourselves. Presumably, we can live as humans on other planets: science fiction has envisioned that situation vividly. Whether we can be human without working or once we share the world with machines that think better than us are harder questions, and the answers depend on what it is to be us.
Later in the book, Arendt will explain that part of being human is to “act.” In her specific meaning of that verb, to act is to discuss what to do with other people who are independent and heterogeneous (Arendt’s “plurality”) and then to do or make things together.
Because many interacting people are required to decide what to do, Arendt cannot tell us how to address developments like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. We must think them through together. She writes:
To these preoccupations and perplexities, this book does not offer an answer. Such answers are given every day, and they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person, as though we dealt here with problems for which only one solution is possible (p. 5).
Why should we make decisions together instead of just doing the right thing? Arendt writes:
There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (p. 4).
We live in a meaningful world–a world with meaning to us–only if we create it together. The question of the moment is whether our world will remain meaningful to us if we transform it through artificial intelligence that we no longer understand.
What are the “truths beyond speech” that Arendt mentions here? The most obvious candidates are transcendent truths, such as religious insights that a person might receive as revelations or intuit by introspecting. But there is a way in which science and technology are also “beyond speech.” Of course, scientists must communicate. However, for them, communication is a cost, a means to the end of analyzing nature. The less talk is necessary to produce knowledge, the better.
Ideally, scientists and technologists apply impersonal methods to generate knowledge that accumulates. A technician can install a light fixture or even design a new electrical device without reading and discussing the words of Alessandro Volta and Nikola Tesla. Historical contributions are now embedded in current techniques, some of which are algorithmic. And if a library is a device for accumulating knowledge, then a Large Language Model may be a better one.
Arendt is a solo scholar, applying her learning and methods to analyze how our thinking has developed so far. Her narrative in The Human Condition is the work of one thinker, yet she is in constant and explicit dialogue with previous writers and with her readers. Thus her contribution lies between “truths beyond speech” and “practical politics.”
The purpose of her text is to set questions that we must answer collectively by thinking and acting:
What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty-seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing (p. 5).
Sources: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958; “Man’s Conquest of Space,” American Scholar 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1963). See also: the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial; Reading Arendt in Palo Alto; the papal encyclical on AI