One of the most engrossing activities of the present day is also, in principle, one of the most horrifying: predicting the year in which computers or robots will finally become superior to humans in assorted tasks ranging from the trivial to the crucial. Those of my generation have already lived through the first victory of a computer (IBM’s “Deep Blue”) over a human chess grandmaster, and by now no human player has a chance in such a match. Now, those of the younger generation have even learned to be suspicious of certain career options (such as truck driver) due to the reported impending arrival of superior machines. A recent Oxford/Yale survey of possible human replacement dates in various fields was one of the best Facebook reads of the year as it circulated from wall to wall. Here are some brief and helpful words summarizing that survey, taken from the pages of New Scientist: “Machines are predicted to be better than [we are] at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, working in retail by 2031, writing a bestselling book by 2049 and surgery by 2053. In fact, all human jobs will be automated within the next 120 years, say respondents.”[1] Even if we assume that this is just another case of over-optimistic futurism, does anyone really expect such projections to be off by more than a few decades? Barring catastrophic relapse in our civilization, the fate of humans seems clear. And if even architecture will only outlive retail and bestseller-writing by an appreciably finite number of years, then my own profession —philosophy— will not be far behind. It might seem that we humans are meant to be swept away like parasites, with our machine offspring assuming the hero’s mantle for the next phase of human history. But in fact, I want to suggest a different likely outcome for the undoubtedly major civilizational transition we are about to undergo.
In his multi-volume work on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger invites us to admire the following remark from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power: “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.”[2] Heidegger comments immediately as follows: “Philosophy of art means ‘aesthetics’ for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.”[3] The main problem with Nietzsche’s usual misogyny in the passage just cited is not so much that it might hurt the feelings of contemporary readers, but that the analogy it uses —feminine is to recipient as masculine is to productive creator— is at best a weak and hazy match for what experience teaches about relations between the sexes. A different theme concerns us here. Namely, there is no reason to go along with the notion that the theory of art should revolve around the creator, unless we have a political axe to grind about the importance of the “legislator of new values,” the artist being of one Nietzsche’s most favored examples. Nietzsche was one author, no doubt one of the greatest, but was still just one author esteemed by millions of readers— not all of them far beneath his own level, we might add. Nietzsche lost his mind at age forty-four and died at fifty-five, but has already been read for more than a century since his physical death, with no doubt much more reading to come. And even during his own lifetime, though Nietzsche’s understanding of his own work was most likely better than our own (though this should hardly be assumed) he too had no choice but to encounter his work as a reader once the brief period of its composition was past.
The standpoint that Nietzsche associates with the supposedly womanly “recipient” of art has not in fact dominated the field of aesthetics. If we consider for instance the powerful aesthetic tradition inspired by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a book that predates Nietzsche’s birth by over half a century, we will find there that the beholder of art’s role is to observe with disinterest, a condition much too cool and aloof to count as what Nietzsche calls reception.[4] Nonetheless, let’s use Michael Fried’s term “beholder” as a rough equivalent of Nietzsche’s “recipient,” given that Fried counsels non-theatrical detachment —and certainly not the attitude of the creator— as the right way to approach art without ruining it, thereby echoing advice already giving by Kant. [5] And let’s introduce the word “thespian” as a terminological opposite for Fried’s “beholder,” whose primary role is to avoid theatrical involvement in the artwork being contemplated. Now, it seems to me that Nietzsche’s distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” approaches to art is fruitless, and would remain so even if the valuation were reversed in a way more amenable to recent anti-patriarchal custom, with feminine aesthetics treated as the superior rather than the inferior kind. For it is by no means clear that producer vs. recipient is an important aesthetic distinction rather than merely an ethical or political one. Reception is the stuff of aesthetics, and any creation is merely a necessary means to the end of reception: in this respect, all aesthetics is “woman’s aesthetics.” Note that all artists consume more art as spectators than they produce as artists; the most prolific authors read far more books than they write; our greatest aesthetic experiences often involve the experience of natural beauty far predating any human being. If there is really a “perspective of the creator” in art, it is probably that of artistic beholders so unsatisfied by the available works created by others that they are compelled to produce art they like for themselves.
The purpose of the past few paragraphs was as follows. The imminent disappearance of the truck-driving profession bothers few of us deeply, since we imagine its functions capably replaced by monitored robot drivers; as citizens we may have political or economic concerns about the loss of the human trucking industry, but few if any functional concerns. The truckers themselves are an obvious exception to this rule. But I would say this is less out of fear for their own economic futures than the fact that, with their lives secured in some other line of work, they will still miss the old trucker’s culture with its baseball hats, its conservative talk radio, its tasty diner food, the romance of its interstate highway routes, its country music superstars, and its static-infested electronic conversations with colleagues. In some respects, a similar pattern will hold once architects and artists are replaced by the hypothetical thinking machines of half a century from now. The newly unemployed architects of the year 2070 may miss the lifestyle of all-night brainstorming over just-announced competition briefs, the chic minimalist suits so valued at corporate presentations, the jet-setting ventures to Venice, Dubai, Doha, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and so forth. The key difference between architecture and trucking, however, is that architecture —unlike trucking— is not just a functional profession staffed by Nietzschean “creators,” but also plays host to an army of “passive” critics, aficionados, jurors, and end users: descriptions that even refer accurately to architects themselves at those moments when they are not designing something themselves. That is to say, even if we imagine a future in which all design tasks and all artistic production is carried out by machines able to do it more effectively than we can, it is harder to imagine criticism and selection also being undertaken by artificial intelligence. Sure enough, we could imagine machines not just producing designs but judging each other’s as well. It is both a comical and technically impressive prospect, but what would the point of it be? On some level it makes sense to let machines do all the work for us— but to let them do all the enjoying for us? However amusing it may be to watch machines rank and critique one another’s work, their judgments would still not be ours. Only a slavish mind would fear challenging the algorithmic judgments of artificial intelligence in as to one’s own direct aesthetic experience.
Is this conclusion merely the symptom of a “reactionary” assumption that first person experience is irreducible to objective third person description, as many contemporary neurophilosophers like to claim? Not at all. To see why not, let’s return to Fried’s term “beholder” and the counter-term I introduced: “thespian.” The beholder is the disinterested observer posited by Kant’s aesthetics, analogous to the disinterested and dutiful actor posited by his ethics.[6] Fried is too loyal to Kant’s deepest underlying principle: that there are two taxonomical “types” of reality —human and world— and under no circumstances must these two types be mixed.[7] Everyone acknowledges that different kinds of chemicals must be mixed to form a compound, and different species of animals to form a zoological park. But for modern philosophy, human and world are taken to be so utterly different in kind that they must never be combined under penalty of mutual contamination.
Once we replace the beholder with the thespian, the situation changes. The aesthetic unit is no longer just the human recipient of art herself (as Kant holds), or just the art object itself without theatrical contamination by the human beholder (as Fried holds). Instead, the basic aesthetic unit is the compound formed of human and work. This human must be invested in the work in some specific way, just as hydrogen and oxygen are invested in each other when forming water: the life of these atoms currently amounts to being part of water rather than part of some other chemical compound. Stated differently, even once we reach the point when artificial intelligence far outstrips me as an aloof beholder, applying algorithms and criteria at speeds biologically closed to me and my fellows, AI cannot possibly replace me in thespian terms. It cannot step into the world and replace who I am, any more than “superior” helium can replace hydrogen in the formation of water. Somewhere in his intricate correspondence, the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft suggests that Francophone high culture may be objectively superior to the Anglophone kind: and yet, as he puts it, Anglophone high culture is mine, and therefore I prefer it nonetheless. In similar fashion, those works of art and design in which I theatrically invest myself are mine, even if they happened to be designed and built by a machine. This sort of investment in art by the spectator has always been a more important side of art than the work of the artist: which has merely been the necessary condition for it, the efficient cause of materials being made available for the spectators of art. Far from being the end of humanity, the end of the human creation of works may open the door to golden millennia of human appreciation of them. At that point, Nietzsche’s mistake will be clearer than ever.