Algorithmic Empathy

Abstract

Creativity as the Last DifferentiaLet me start with an observation. It was recorded in 1942 by German philosopher Günther Anders. Having escaped the Nazis and living in California at the time, Anders brought with him the distanced sensibility of the European exile who, not unlike his fellow émigré Theodor W. Adorno, understood America, and California in particular, as the intensified expression of life in capitalist modernity. In a journal entry, which would later become the first chapter of his book The Obsolescence of Human Beings, he described a visit to a technology exhibition, in which a friend acted rather curiously: as if he were ashamed to be a human, and not a machine. This, Anders noted, was a novel phenomenon, "an entirely new pudendum …; a form of shame that did not exist in the past. I will provisionally call it 'Promethean shame' . " This was to denote the "shame felt when confronted by the 'humiliatingly' high quality of fabricated things. " 1 I thank Michel Chaouli, Julia Pelta Feldman, Annette Gilbert, Colin Lang, as well as the discussants at two events at