For normal people, immortality is one of those inchoate, unearnest desires born of negative feelings — loss, fear, regret, and the like — that is readily discarded in our more sober moments. Putting aside those who believe that we survive death as souls, spirits, “essences” or what have you and go on to exist in blissful perpetuity in some heavenly ether or other — a mindset that requires its own separate discussion — most of us understand that immortality, in the sense of actually living forever, is a terrible idea, if only because at some point one will get sick and tired of everything, including oneself. Human tolerance is a finite resource after all.

There is a version of this desire, however, that is prevalent among academics (as well as artists of every medium and stripe) which, though not requiring any spooky metaphysics or unrealistic science, is equally fanciful and ill-advised: namely, that one’s ideas and work should be immortal. And while I’m sure that one can find this thirst for eternal significance across the academic disciplines and arts, it is particularly notable in philosophy, where it has been expressed recently in some strange and over-the-top ways. Indeed, just a few years ago, it was articulated in spectacular fashion, when the perennially ridiculous Jason Stanley said the following on social media:

I would regard myself as an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years. I have zero intention of being just another Ivy League professor whose work lasts as long as they are alive.

Now, Stanley has been one of academic philosophy’s most lampoonable characters for some time (a distinction he shares with the equally absurd Agnes Callard), whose antics could serve as the subject-matter for an essay all of its own. (This video mashup of the Great Ivy League Professor — who has since decamped to Canada — never ceases to amuse.) So, I couldn’t have imagined that anyone in the discipline would take his vainglorious ejaculations seriously enough to actually theorize about how they might be realized. Yet, that’s exactly what someone has done and in a way that intersects with academic philosophy’s other current unfortunate obsession, so-called “artificial intelligence.”

That thinking one’s philosophical ideas should forever remain influential is Quixotic at best should be obvious to anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with the subject. If the work of history’s greatest scientists eventually gets lost in the currents of time due to the discoveries and innovations of their intellectual descendants, then those involved in a decidedly non-factual discipline like philosophy should expect this to be even more true in their own region of discursive space. Perhaps more than any other subject, philosophy is subject to trends and fads, and the hottest property in one era may be completely ignored in another, something that has been catalogued in an illuminating and helpful fashion by Eric Schwitzgebel in a recent essay, which charts the fortunes of the work of history’s most distinguished philosophers over the decades, from 1940 to the present. 

Trying to game historical trends like these is clearly pointless, but hope springs eternal, and AI has come along in the nick of time for those who aspire to Eternal Philosophical Relevance. And as is the case with so many of academic philosophy’s clownish episodes, I have the intrepid editor of The Daily Nous to thank for calling my attention to this latest one, which comes from the keyboard of Tyler Coen, who wrote the following for Bloomberg (and which is also excerpted at Marginal Revolution):

If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs. If you want your grandchildren or great-grandchildren to know what you thought about a topic, the AIs can give them a pretty good idea. After all, the AIs will have digested much of your corpus and built a model of how you think. Your descendants, or maybe future fans, won’t have to page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas.

It’s a remarkable proposition. AI bots, which indiscriminately vacuum up written material with a hitherto unimaginable speed and scope, will suck in your stuff too, so when future generations turn to AI for their own edification or research — once libraries full of “dusty old books” have become little more than a dim memory — the amazing corpus you’ve developed over your lifetime will have been integrated into the generic soup that the software spits out. Of course, there also is the coveted “profile” of your work that can be summoned via the bot at a moment’s notice (why it would occur to anyone to ask for it if you aren’t already known is never explained), and which will include none of the distinctive stylistic and other literary qualities of your prose, but never mind. If one’s philosophy is meant to “latch on to reality,” as Craig Warmke put it in a comment that is as clueless and confused as Cowen’s piece, “why wouldn’t you want the LLMs to be trained on your writing for the greater good?”

That this technology depends on the mass-theft of intellectual property doesn’t trouble such people. Indeed, Warmke and others in the discussion that follows are “bewildered” that there are philosophers who actually want to own and be paid for their work. “It’s hard for me to understand the mentality of an academic who would prefer a $100 check over influence in the model weights of widely used LLMs,” Warmke remarks, demonstrating that the promise of Eternal Influence makes for an enticing and heady cocktail, even for those who are supposed to be among society’s most rational thinkers. That this software routinely cannot get the number of fingers and toes on human hands and feet right when generating images, persistently offers ungrammatical recommendations on even the simplest documents, “hallucinates” and engages willy nilly in outright fabrication (Google’s AI bot just advised me that ‘willy nilly’ is misspelled) and has even offered troubled teens advice on how best to commit suicide is all lost in the dazzling light of the promise of a philosophical legacy without end.

Apparently, it is too much to expect that people who count Ethics as one of their areas of expertise should understand even the most rudimentary things about human personality and character: that pridefulness is generally a bad thing; that desperately clutching and grasping for legacy is not a sign of spiritual well-being; that humility is a virtue, not hubris; or that status-seeking on an epochal scale suggests insecurity rather than strength. It seems quaint to hope that academic philosophers would want to explore the essential and humbling truths that make for a satisfying and emotionally healthy human life: that our time on the earth and with our loved ones is brief; that any lasting impact we have likely will be through the memories of those whose lives we’ve touched at a personal level and will fade as memory inevitably does; and that the ultimate value of one’s creative endeavors must lie in the joy one finds in doing them, rather than in external recognition or accolades. Indeed, this “immortality through AI” stuff is reminiscent of the “downloading your consciousness” foolishness that was all the rage not too long ago among certain members of the Smart Set, and demonstrates that for far too many people in our discipline today, whatever philosophical activity is an expression of, it is not a love of wisdom.