Babette Babich is an American philosopher, a founder of the New Nietzsche Studies writing on continental aesthetics, philosophy of science (Nietzsche), technology (Heidegger, Anders), critical and cultural theory. She published Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory in 2021 (Bloomsbury academic). 

Why has the philosophy of Günther Anders gained renewed relevance in 2026, particularly in discussions about artificial intelligence and automation?  

BB: This is an important question — after 70 years of inattention. It’s not as if what Anders wrote attracted commentary in 1956 to begin with! To the contrary, because Anders chose, unlike his fellow travelers in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, those would include names like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to focus, very controversially, on positions critical of US intelligence agencies, like the FBI and the US habit of wiretapping its citizens. Today, these questions are as relevant as ever but we continue to disattend to government influence even as we are increasingly recognizing the omnipresence of ‘surveillance.’ Thus one writes about ‘surveillance capitalism’ but one does not mention Anders who was, arguably, already writing about this decades ago. Discussions of artificial intelligence need Anders because he was one of the first to write about its use in military decisions, specifically with respect to General MacArthur in Korea, and for reasons that are still relevant. Who, when a military strategy is decided via computer, we call it AI, is to be held ‘responsible’ for the bombing? If it happens automatically is it not a quasi-act of God? The pentagon liked to think in these ways and only Friedrich Kittler and Peter Sloterdijk have thought to raise related questions in the interim.  

How does Anders’s concept of the “Promethean gap” help explain contemporary ethical tensions between technological power and human responsibility?  

BB: Scholars who write on Anders opt for ‘Promethean gap’ and thereby resolve Anders’s questions concerning what he identified as a brand new or novel variety of shame in the 20th century, never seen before, so he argued, unrelated to varieties of shame as psychologists analyze shame with respect to the phenomenon in everyday life or, classically, theologically, with Adam and Eve and the postlapsarian expulsion from paradise. This was a ‘shame’ in the face of the machines humans had themselves fabricated: a shame deeply related to envy, the desire to be like the machine, not in the sense of having mechanical powers, given the patent limitations of machines, built into mechanical........

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