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.

I. Ethics and world stability

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 oth...

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