Publish at February 19 2025 Updated February 19 2025
The ongoing empowerment of our environments by artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous technologies represents a major anthropological turning point. It calls into question our relationship with the world, our ontology and the evolution of knowledge. Far from being neutral, this transformation reveals profound dynamics, historical patterns and complex long-term consequences.
By drawing on the perspectives of contemporary philosophers such as Bernard Stiegler, Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Augustin Berque, we can decipher the implications of this mutation and envisage its future trends.
The main driving force behind this empowerment is twofold. On the one hand, the quest for efficiency and rationality, inscribed in the very logic of modernity, seeks to optimize human and organizational processes. According to Bernard Stiegler (2019), automation prolongs a historical dynamic in which technology, by becoming increasingly autonomous, restructures our societies and our relationship to time.
On the other hand, as Gilbert Simondon (1958) has shown, technology responds to the human need to delegate certain tasks to technical objects, thus liberating the individual while transforming his or her relationship to the world. This delegation, initially linked to practical needs, intensifies with AI, where traditionally human functions - such as decision-making or reflection - are assumed by algorithmic systems.
However, this empowerment is profoundly reconfiguring our environments, in the mesological sense defined by Augustin Berque (2000). The environment, co-constructed by the interaction between humans and their environment, is today infiltrated by data flows and autonomous decision-making that alter its equilibrium.
By becoming autonomous actors, technological environments are changing the way humans inhabit the world. This phenomenon, according to Berque, constitutes a transformation of the eco-techno-symbolic milieu, where the hypertrophy of technical and abstract dimensions overwhelms sensitive and embodied experiences. For example, recommendation algorithms, omnipresent in our digital lives, restructure our interactions with knowledge and culture, while limiting the plurality of lived experiences.
This technological intrusion also engenders an accelerated temporality, incompatible with the natural rhythms of human habitation. As Stiegler (2019) argues, automation produces a loss of control over time, as technological processes operate on a much faster scale than human thought. This dynamic particularly affects our capacity for attention and critical reflection, reducing our ability to fully inhabit the world. Bruno Latour (2005) also warns against the illusion of technological neutrality: automated environments, far from being objective, embody social, political and economic logics that amplify power asymmetries.
In ontological terms, this empowerment calls into question the place and role of the human. With Heidegger (1954), this transformation can be seen as a manifestation of Gestell, in which the world is progressively reduced to a stock of available resources. The human being becomes a passive user in an environment structured for him, but without him, which alters his intentionality. Francisco Varela (1991), in introducing the concept of embodied cognition, was already stressing the importance of corporeality and sensitive interaction in the construction of human experience. However, the empowerment of environments tends to disembody these interactions, reducing humans to mere operators of technological infrastructures.
More generally, the empowerment of environments challenges human ontology by transforming action. Direct action gives way to programmed action, where humans no longer decide, but configure systems that decide for them. This redistribution of action, while effective, weakens the human being by making him or her dependent on complex technologies over which they do not always have full control. Donna Haraway (1991), in her cyborg manifesto, sees this man-machine hybridization as an opportunity, but also warns of the dangers of technological domination over humans.
These upheavals are having a profound effect on knowledge. Epistemic authority, traditionally embodied in human expertise, is now shifting to algorithmic systems. Knowledge produced by machines, perceived as neutral and objective, risks supplanting more contextualized and embodied forms of knowledge. As Haraway (1988) points out, this illusion of neutrality conceals the biases and interests embedded in the technologies themselves. What's more, algorithmic logic, centered on quantification and optimization, reduces knowledge to abstract data, cut off from lived realities. This trend particularly weakens sensitive and relational knowledge, essential to a holistic understanding of the world.
Over the long term, several trends are taking shape. One of the most worrying is the reinforcement of power asymmetries. As Zuboff (2019) shows, the surveillance economy, based on the exploitation of personal data, increases inequalities between those who master autonomous technologies and those who depend on them. Furthermore, growing dependence on autonomous environments could lead to ecological and social fragility. A breakdown in these infrastructures, for example, would seriously compromise our ability to act and decide.
However, alternatives are possible. Drawing on the work of Katherine Hayles (1999) on posthumanity, it is possible to conceive of a symbiosis between humans and technologies, where the autonomy of environments would not be a threat, but an opportunity to enhance human capabilities while respecting their diversity and complexity. This symbiosis implies rethinking our relationship with knowledge and environments from a relational and ecosystemic perspective.
In conclusion, the empowerment of environments, while inevitable, should not be seen as a foregone conclusion. It invites us to cultivate critical vigilance and reinvest the sensitive and relational dimensions of our relationship with the world. Augustin Berque (2000) reminds us that the human being is a being of the environment, embedded in a complex web of interactions between the natural, the technical and the symbolic. If this web becomes unbalanced, humans risk losing their ability to fully inhabit the world.
An augmented relational ontology, based on co-evolution between humans, technologies and environments, could offer a way of overcoming these challenges while preserving the fundamental values of the human condition.
Sources
Berque, A. (2000). Écoumène: Introduction à l'étude des milieux humains. Belin.
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Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575-599.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066
Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.
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Heidegger, M. (1954). Die Frage nach der Technik. Günther Neske.
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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.
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Simondon, G. (1958). Du mode d'existence des objets techniques. Aubier.
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Stiegler, B. (2019). What do we call dressing? 1. L'immense régression. Les Liens Qui Libèrent.
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Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism - Shoshana Zuboff
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