7. Artificial Intelligence and the Need to Redefine Human Traits

Galit Wellner argues that digital and virtual technologies like AI not only change how we experience the world, but also transform human mental capacities. While industrial technologies predominantly concern embodiment relations (e.g. extending or replacing manual labor), technologies like AI bear on the mind, notably in terms of imagination and attention. Wellner argues that Ihde’s phenomenological analyses insufficiently articulate this contrast because of their emphasis on embodied perception, which appears less relevant in technologies like cryptocurrency and generative AI. Turning to the theme of attention, the chapter first presents Husserl’s classical phenomenological interpretation of attention as ‘searchlight’, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s critique of this interpretation. Wellner subsequently indicates the limits of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘field of attention’ which, like Ihde, unduly prioritizes embodiment and fails to account for the phenomenon of multitasking. Wellner accordingly calls for supplanting the phenomenological first person perspective with a layered approach focusing on plateaus, where embodiment relations make way for embrainment relations.