Perhaps [Günther] Anders’s most important concept for our current moment, however, is that of the “Promethean gradient.” He uses this term to refer to the disproportionality between human faculties: we can achieve things in the sphere of technology that far outstrip the ability of our moral imagination to comprehend them.
An example would be nuclear weapons: the level of destruction that a nuclear bomb can achieve is far beyond anything we can imagine. That possibly apocryphal saying ascribed to Josef Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” captures this idea. I might be horrified at the face of a murder victim on the news; a picture of the mushroom cloud at Nagasaki does not have the same impact. Today, we can apply it to the tech bros: their technological innovation proceeds at a pace that outstrips any moral vision that might curb or direct it.
In light of this, the early departure of the tech bros from the summit I mentioned is understandable: there can be no moral accountability—indeed, they cannot even imagine what that would look like—because they are engaged in technological innovations beyond anything the current moral imagination can grasp. As Hans Jonas observed in the early 1970s, the advent of technology that was not simply external to human beings (steam, the internal combustion engine) but that touched on the nature of existence at both a profound and highly abstract level—for Jonas, chemistry; for us now, genetic engineering—grants the technological revolution theoretically limitless power to destabilize what it means to be human. And we cannot imagine what that might look like. Add to that the implications of social acceleration—that technology develops at a faster pace than can be assimilated into the moral imagination—and the problem Anders calls the Promethean gradient is set to become worse. Our technology liberates us from any sense of the authority of natural limits (let alone God-given ends), yet in itself it provides no new moral norms for how such liberation is to be exercised.
But the Promethean gradient is not simply significant in the way it unshackles technological development from the moral imagination. It also has a paradoxical effect on human experience: our genius for technological development, that capacity that separates us from all other creatures and arguably forms part of our greatness, is precisely what renders us nothing in our eyes and therefore feeds despair. This Anders calls “Promethean shame,” which he sees as the result of the conflict between knowing ourselves as persons and yet finding ourselves reduced to mere “things” because of the technology we ourselves have developed. In Anders’s day, the primary culprits were nuclear weapons. Their development required the collaboration of free, intelligent, intentional human persons. But the result was that we human beings became the only creatures on earth who could, quite literally, annihilate ourselves. Man’s exceptional technological greatness had ironically given him the ability to make himself puny, contingent, and unnecessary in his own eyes.
Today, this still applies, but it has expanded beyond narrow military technology to include such things as AI and transhumanism.
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