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Jan Henrik Wasserziehr

PhD Candidate
Department of Government

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About

About

I am a political philosopher working at the intersection of critical theory and the philosophy of AI. My research concerns the relationship between technical progress and modern ideas of human freedom, and the effects of AI on human cognition, reason, and autonomy. I also work on the ethics of artificial consciousness and the moral status of artificial systems. I have published in the European Journal of Political Theory and AI & Society, and have been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before the PhD, I worked for three years at a political consultancy in Berlin.

Fleeting Freedom: Technical Progress and the Fate of Modernity

Since Bacon and Descartes, modern political thought has assumed that mastering nature could liberate humanity from the whims of fortune and thereby contribute to human freedom. I argue that both liberal and Marxist versions of this idea are tenuous: the trajectory of technological change cannot, as liberals suppose, be reliably governed by norms; and technology-driven productivity gains will not, as Marxists hope, culminate in the liberation of workers. Contemporary discontents with technology, from climate breakdown to the erosion of democracies, are not disparate phenomena but structural features of the technoscientific project: rather than eliminating fortune, human reason and ingenuity have generated a new contingency of their own making.

Can technical progress make us free? On the idea of freedom from labour

Can technical progress free humanity from necessity and labour? Taking inspiration from a remark in Arendt's Human Condition, I argue that the idea of freedom from labour is bound to turn on itself—it presupposes social transformations that gradually render existing concepts of freedom unintelligible and meaningless.

Professor Katrin Flikschuh (Supervisor) and Professor Lea Ypi (Advisor)