Being Human in a Post-Human World: Actor-Network Theory for Anxiety-Induced Meaning-Making in the Existential Shadow of AI
Authors: Fry, A.D.J.
Journal: Implicit Religion
Volume: 26
Issue: 2-3
Pages: 231-257
eISSN: 1743-1697
ISSN: 1463-9955
DOI: 10.1558/imre.30727
Abstract:As society has become aware of artificial intelligence’s (AI) detrimental social impact, existential anxiety has emerged. Scholarship suggests that such anxiety could facilitate populism, reduced democracy, and social unrest. However, meaning-making reduces existential anxiety, meaning it has potential for addressing this fall out of AI. Public-facing scholarship on AI’s detrimental impact is often US- and UK-based. This paper argues that, whilst this literature evinces meaning-making, it fails to offer an explicit framework for doing so. The paper further argues that this occurs alongside the uncritical incorporation of elements from the Judaeo-Christian tradition into meaning-making. These factors potentially limit the efficacy of attempts to assuage AI-induced anxiety in pluralistic Western societies and so this paper considers how the application of insights from Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory are well placed to address these shortcomings. Adjacently, the porous boundaries between the so-called religious and non-religious in academic discourse are highlighted via dialogue between meaning-making and a canonical theory in science and technology studies.
Source: Scopus
Being human in a post-human world: Actor-network theory for meaning-making in the existential shadow of AI
Authors: Fry, A.
Journal: Implicit Religion
Publisher: Equinox Publishing Ltd
ISSN: 1463-9955
Source: Manual