The rapid progress of AI has exposed a problem we’ve been avoiding: our environment is becoming increasingly alien. It takes on new shapes with increasing speed and renders our past frameworks obsolete. The world becomes opaque and its logic unclear and our agency starts to dissolve with it. We have been thinking a lot about the ethics of AI, but not about ethics for the AI age. Judging from the public response to AI acceleration, this is becoming a recurrent fear. We argue for a potential solution to this issue: creating a bridge between ethics of the past and our changing world.
This problem is not new. It was named, in the early 1800s, the problem of modernity. Back then, it already referred to this feeling of estrangement, of a world not built for those living in it. The rise of trade and industrialism rapidly changed social and economic conditions. Thinkers of the time attempted to offer solutions to this question. Two types of solutions were offered, either to stop this change, or to change our relation to it. As attempts to stop modernity soon failed, most solutions converged on changing our relation to the inevitable. Our relation to the world is shaped by principles -an ethics that guide our actions. But ethics rely on a stable picture of the world. There must be some clarity on what we can act upon before we can assess which ones are right and desirable. Changes in our lived environment since the industrial revolution have blurred this picture, old moral frameworks no longer fit neatly. The result was disorientation and the social crisis of the XIXth and XXth century, each a response to the problem of modernity.
Yet AI has reformulated the problem of modernity to the extent that it is unrecognizable. This feeling of estrangement has reached epidemic levels. The last elements of stability are being eroded before our eyes. A stable ground is not found anymore, as if our life was being steamrolled by massive economic change. Naturally, we lack the framework to go about it. Our strategies do not work in this new world; from getting a job and relating to people to finding meaning and purpose. A new ethic has to be found.
Ethical systems have always tried to answer a basic question: what should I do? But behind that question lies an assumption, that we know where we are. Ethics, in other words, has always depended on a stable world in which action takes place.
In most of Western thought, that stability was a given. From the early ages of Ancient Greece onward, ethical reasoning implies a stable, organized, environment; the kosmos. The world was naturally ordered, and ethics was about locating oneself within that order. Later thinkers followed suit. The Stoics also believed that ethics meant living in harmony with nature, conceived as an eternal order of things.
Christian ethics relied largely on the Greek ideal, but extended this idea to include (i) respect to God and (ii) to your neighbor. The very framing reflected an idea of the neighborhood as a stable, spatial environment in which good works could be done. Rationalistic ethics all the way up to Kant maintained this underlying assumption, of a stable ground which contains the world and the ethical problems that could arise within.
Modern frameworks are also hard pressed. Consequentialism, which judges actions by their outcomes, breaks down when outcomes are impossible to predict. We can no longer foresee the consequences of most actions and perform moral calculation. Deontology, which focuses on moral rules, struggles when the application of these rules is murky. Even virtue ethics, which focuses on good character, falters when the coherence of the world collapses.
As the world changes, new challenges arise which traditional ethics only partially address. It is not to say they are irrelevant; they simply haven’t yet been adapted to the shape of our new reality. Most of our problems would seem deeply alien to any Greek or early Christian thinker. Such ethical frameworks were meant for solving problems within these stable conceptions of the world. Even though we still share core features of the human condition, the problems we face are different. How would Greek and Christian ethics, for instance, address modern isolation, estrangement, or collapse of one’s understanding of the world ? The answer is far from straightforward.
Although these problems are not entirely new, we have now reached ethical escape velocity. The changes in the world are faster than our capacity to create new concepts and ideas. In this sense, ethics becomes increasingly unclear. And we are becoming acutely aware of our limitations. The gap between ethical precepts and the world is growing increasingly large, thereby making it increasingly difficult to apply them. The plans that one would make in one’s life are now overturned, as friendship becomes virtual and jobs automated.
We are left with tools not adapted to the tasks. This generates the problem of our age; anxiety. It stems from a lack of framework to navigate what is given, and the very limitations of the framework clearly manifest themselves before our eyes. The problem is also that we are not sure what to do, we are not even sure what we should want in a moving world. What objects, what things should we even wish for when reality isn’t clear ?
The current problem basically boils down to this: the sheer size and complexity of the space renders the application of our ethical concepts difficult. The space where ethics are clearly applicable remains local, scoped situations.
But perhaps the key to understanding our time is not in what has disappeared, but in what remains. Beneath the overwhelming speed and complexity of modern life, the same core structures endure. We are still talking about our human reality, but on a completely different scale. Our world hasn’t been replaced but has been intensified and compounded. Online communities are a perfect example; we now have enormous communities with fast information flow, but it is still, at its root, people talking, listening, and forming meaning together. It’s still a version of the public square, even if its dimensions have expanded. This public square is here spread out across a vast new space, where time and distance acquire a new geometry.
In this sense, our new world is made of the same building blocks, that of human existence. The same words, the same images. We are simply dealing with a large number of lived, human situations, all at once. The symbols, ideas and dreams that it contains, are found in this intensified world, simply at a new level of speed, and association. Although we can’t fully understand it as we understood the world in the past, we can decompose it into compounds of human life. In other words, we can dimly identify the elements that have been reshaped and intensified - as in the town square we discussed.
Currently, we are looking at the modern world all at once, which leaves us overwhelmed. We are unable to apply ethical principles at this scale. Yet its core components are familiar to us. And regardless of how the world will evolve, how alien the world will seem overall, it will continue to compound human experience into this complex reality. The base human reality, of our lived environment, will always be at the root, even if the sheer complexity overwhelms us.
This basic feature is a foothold for a new ethic. If this new world simply reworks human reality, then our previous ethical frameworks have something to bring. A modern ethic is not transposing the old, simply creating a bridge between our original space of life, and this intensified modern world.
We cannot understand this complexity, but we can reframe it within a scale which is familiar to us. And in doing so, we create a common ground with ethics of the past. The common ground is simply a basic form of embodied human existence with others, one which has been a constant through human history. The modern world is constrained by our existential structures. Even AI is trained on human data, and is meant to solve human problems. The question is then - how can we adapt our ethics to this compounded world ?
We can rebuild from the building blocks. That is trying to decompose what we see into simpler, embodied situation of human lives. In doing so, we create this pathway with the past. In this way, the problem of modern anxiety can be understood as fear of the unknown, which the Greeks have faced before us. This gives modern relevance to Epicurus’ famous precepts when faced with the unknowns of god or death or Xenophon and his troops stranded in a foreign land. Beyond a reference point, it also gives an aesthetical frame by transposing us back in a lived situation. It breaks with the abstract and cold nature of a complex world.
This approximation is a metaphor. But for once, the metaphor is not poetic. It is a framework which guides our actions; these metaphors emerge as ways of linking past and present. This alien modernity starts to appear familiar, when framed in a familiar setting. In doing so, these metaphors provide clarity on what we should do. They directly connect to feelings of right and wrong, to the consequences they have, to core moral principles, or even to an idea of the character that one should be.
Familiarity is the condition for advancement and meaning. It is also one for a safe approach to the world, one in which there can be a transmission of ideas and meaning. The modern world is just a large amount of these situations and metaphors, taken all at once. But then the ethical intuition is clearer. We have a situation where we know where we are going. When the world makes sense and becomes familiar again, we have space where ethical choices can be confidently made.
If such is the case, the ongoing problem of modernity is maybe an issue in our capacity of imagination more than our philosophical capacities. In all cases, the alternatives are not many. One could build, from scratch, a new framework for the modern world. This isn’t a good solution. We would get carried away by the change, and have to readapt at each shift. In any case, we would not reach the desired stability.
Jettisoning our past is like berating a child for not being an adult. Things have to evolve, people have to grow. It is the same for frameworks which need people and ideas to adapt. Things will have to move, but they must grow organically. A new ethic can only grow from the old ones, and cover the edges where things have been limited, until maybe, a new framework can unify them. But in any case, this will never be discarding things of the past. Until then, the current approach should be the one that works.