Günther Anders (1902-1992) is a 20th century philosopher for our time, which is fitting since he saw himself as uncomfortably ‘too early’ for his own.

Almost unheard of in the English-speaking world, he was at the centre of German philosophy before the rise of Hitler and the catastrophe of the Second World War. Student of Husserl, Heidegger, and later Tillich, he was a second cousin of Walter Benjamin, a friend of Berthold Brecht and was Hannah Arendt’s first husband. Given this pedigree I found it surprising he was (to me) so obscure. In post-war Germany he was a big deal. Now he’s back in fashion, thanks to the eery prescience of his masterwork, The Obsolescence of Man (vol. 1, 1956, vol.2, 1980) and its clear relevance to the current AI revolution.

Anders coined the phrase ‘Promethean shame’, which is a kind of embarrassment at being human when faced with the apparently superior capabilities of our technology.

💬 “Our aim is always to create something that could dispense with our assistance and function perfectly without us. In other words, nothing less than appliances through whose functioning we make ourselves superfluous, eliminate ourselves, liquidate ourselves. It is of no consequence that we only ever approximately achieve this goal. What counts is this trend and its maxim, which is: “without us!".” — Günther Anders, ‘The Term’.

In February 2026 Greg Knauss wrote a much-noticed blog post, entitled, Lose myself, about his feelings of obsolescence as a computer software engineer.

“💬 What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.”
“What I’m talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters.”

With mass lay-offs in the tech industry, many people might have been feeling this sense of existential redundancy, but Manton Reece, also a long-time software creator, took a different view, perhaps the ‘glass half full’ approach, which may indicate that there’s a certain degree of subjectivity to Promethean shame. In Not faster, now possible he wrote:

💬 “If all we see is the work we currently do being replaced and done better by robots, we’ll miss everything that will make software companies successful in the future — a thousand ideas that could improve people’s lives in small ways.”

Whether you personally feel obsolete or not, and whether or not AI is coming after your own job, Anders’ thought is also relevant in terms of the apparent failure of the popular imagination in relation to AI’s future impacts.

Anders’ wrote of ‘inverted utopians’. Whereas the original utopians were unable to create what they could imagine, modern humans are unable to imagine what they have created.

💬 ‘We Are Inverted Utopians’: The basic dilemma of our age is that ‘we are smaller than ourselves’, incapable of mentally realizing the realities which we ourselves have produced. Therefore we might call ourselves ‘inverted Utopians’: while ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing. (Günther Anders, 1962: 496)

This might sound strange until we consider the starry-eyed pronouncements of contemporary leaders of technological change. They promise their innovations will deliver extraordinary improvements in productivity and wealth but are unable to give any real details. This has been characterised as CEOs aspiring to be Thomas Edison while talking like P.T. Barnum, but an encounter with Anders’ thought suggests this flummery may be more an inherent feature of technological change than a deliberate intention to deceive.

Author and literature professor Alan Jacobs observes that there’s a massive gap in the public discourse about how AI is impacting the economy:

💬 “I keep hearing AI advocates say that the universal deployment of AI will create a “productivity explosion” and “unprecedented wealth creation” and will “end poverty.” All I want to know is: How? How will the money made by the big AI companies end up in the pockets of the poor? I’m not even asking for a plausible scenario — I’d be happy to see any scenario at all, anything more than “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS.””

Reading this I imagine how the CEO of OpenAI or Anthropic might respond. Perhaps by gaslighting us about how we should just be happy that everyone else is feeling really bullish. But having also read Anders, I feel perhaps these CEOs couldn’t imagine their own technology, even if they sincerely wanted to. Maybe the technology itself precludes such understanding.

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, back in 2023, when I suggested that more than ever, embracing your humanity is the way forward. And, oh look! It still is.

When I consider the crude Trumpian fixation on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ I can’t help feeling that there’s a certain adolescent American narcissism about the need to avoid being seen to be a ‘loser’.

In the civilised world, this desperation may seem pathological. After all, from cradle to grave, each one of us will definitely experience periods of complete helplessness, where we are utterly dependent on the support of others. But in a society with few or broken social safety nets, it’s quite possible that a fear of ‘losing’ is hardwired into the population by means of a politics which names, targets and materially punishes ‘losers’ of all kinds. So it’s ironic that large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies, which now seem to make everyone a loser, have been invented in this America and are being touted there as the brightest and best future.

As with all such promises, it’s worth asking ‘brightest and best for whom?’ If the technology’s benefits flow upward, as they tend to, then the losers it creates will be many, and the imagining we need to do, of alternatives, of resistance, of what it means to be human, becomes a necessity rather than a luxury.

And there’s a third sense in which Anders’ thought is relevant today. He argues that humans aren’t just technologically obsolete, in the sense that the tools and systems they invented have outclassed them. They’re also morally obsolete.   Anders reached this viewpoint from having lived through the German population’s reception of Hitler, in which many quietly, even willingly, accepted their role as functionaries in a technocratic totalitarian system, and the Holocaust as a system of mass murder, and the atomic bomb as a technology of mass destruction. Having invented unimaginable power it was hard to imagine how to handle it. The atomic bomb was the clearest possible example of this moral deficit: having invented our own extinction it was now impossible, collectively, to turn it down.  It was as though the morality required for the Twentieth Century was unavailable to those who lived there.

Günther Anders has been called a philosopher of the apocalypse. But really he’s a philosopher of the day before the apocalypse, reminding his readers that it’s still not too late; that choices can still be made; that in spite of appearances we can still make them.

Reflecting on Anders’ philosophy, Indian educationalist Badruddin (2026) argues that’s what’s needed is “a transformative educational model that prioritizes ethical literacy, existential reflection, and critical engagement with technology… a pedagogy that not only resists passive adaptation to technological systems, but also fosters autonomous, ethically grounded individuals.”

That’s laudable, but what kind of education can foster an ethical approach to the use of AI, beyond simply accepting the default settings and whatever our corporate overlords decide we must now use? I guess we’re going to find out.

And while we’re working on this, it’s important to recognise that AI isn’t suddenly making us obsolete. As Anders reminds us, we already were. But this isn’t a counsel of despair; it’s a recognition of the enduring human condition. My range is me and though that might be tough it’s simply nothing to be ashamed of.

Further reading

Anders, G. (1962) Theses for the Atomic Age. The Massachusetts Review 3(3): 493–505.

Babich, B. (2022). Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology: From Phenomenology to Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

Badruddin. (2026). Harnessing Gunther Günther Anders’ Existential Insights for Educational Enrichment. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 99(1), 1–18. doi.org/10.1080/0…

Borowski, A. (2022). Philosopher of the Apocalypse. Aeon Magazine. https://aeon.co/essays/gunther-anders-a-forgotten-prophet-for-the-21st-century

Müller, C. J. (2016). Prometheanism: technology, digital culture and human obsolescence. (Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics). Rowman & Littlefield.

You can hear a discussion on Anders with Nalah Ayad, Babette Babich and Chris Müller on CBC.

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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Beginners and intermediate learners fear ‘making mistakes’; experts seldom do. Not because experts don’t make mistakes: they do. It’s just that experts know what to do next.

Here’s Herbie Hancock telling what he learned from his mentor Miles Davis: Every mistake is an opportunity [openculture.com].