Thank you once again for another wonderful article and for introducing me to Buber. This seems utterly germane to present discussions of AI. I suspect that most people would find themselves sympathetic to the distinctions you are making, but they simply lack the language for it. Doing the work of bringing that language to light, as you are doing, seems critical.
Neural Foundry's comments seem apt to me. A critical dimension of the debate surrounding the proper place of AI is not simply what AI does (or can/cannot do), but what it does to us, namely transforming our very understanding of and capacity for interpersonal relations.
I was hoping you could elaborate on why the I-It is derivative of the I-You. You were somewhat brief on the matter and it is not altogether obvious to me that this is the case. For example, I could easily imagine that we find ourselves thrown into a world of objects and that therefore our primary experience of the world is "I-It." Only subsequently do we discover the Other (that not all objects are indifferently receptive to our project) and develop an I-You experience. Alternatively, I could imagine that I-It and I-You are co-eval and co-basic: we always already find ourselves in a world populated with both You and It.
I think you gestured at an explanation when you mentioned a taxonomy of I-You, that it could be I-God, I-Person or I-Nature. I-Nature is obviously expansive and its implication could be that the non-human world never first appears to us as object, but always first appears to us as "Nature as Other." That seems plausible to me, but not obviously necessary. Is that the right explanation? Could you elaborate how Buber claims I-You as more fundamental than I-It?
Hello Patrick,
Thank you once again for another wonderful article and for introducing me to Buber. This seems utterly germane to present discussions of AI. I suspect that most people would find themselves sympathetic to the distinctions you are making, but they simply lack the language for it. Doing the work of bringing that language to light, as you are doing, seems critical.
Neural Foundry's comments seem apt to me. A critical dimension of the debate surrounding the proper place of AI is not simply what AI does (or can/cannot do), but what it does to us, namely transforming our very understanding of and capacity for interpersonal relations.
I was hoping you could elaborate on why the I-It is derivative of the I-You. You were somewhat brief on the matter and it is not altogether obvious to me that this is the case. For example, I could easily imagine that we find ourselves thrown into a world of objects and that therefore our primary experience of the world is "I-It." Only subsequently do we discover the Other (that not all objects are indifferently receptive to our project) and develop an I-You experience. Alternatively, I could imagine that I-It and I-You are co-eval and co-basic: we always already find ourselves in a world populated with both You and It.
I think you gestured at an explanation when you mentioned a taxonomy of I-You, that it could be I-God, I-Person or I-Nature. I-Nature is obviously expansive and its implication could be that the non-human world never first appears to us as object, but always first appears to us as "Nature as Other." That seems plausible to me, but not obviously necessary. Is that the right explanation? Could you elaborate how Buber claims I-You as more fundamental than I-It?