The Anthropological Aura

We believe this article is a must-read for anyone thinking about the question "what it means to be human", particularly in a world where many of the things that previously seemed to uniquely define us are now able to be done by AI systems.

One small excerpt, but please read the full piece to fully grasp this important argument.

"Here is perhaps the most controversial claim I am making. To be philosophically unsettled by the steady erosion of the superiority of human capabilities over those of machines is to be possessed by the same misapprehension which would incline us to make no distinction between a work of art and any of its reproductions: each is to conceive of things only in terms of their features—that share of their existence which is available to duplication and export—and to extract from the spatially-situated and temporarily-bound existence inhering in an original an equality and commensurability with reproductions of those same features found elsewhere. “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura”, Benjamin writes, “is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”This is as true of the sensibility which refuses to distinguish between an artwork and one of perhaps innumerable copies as it is of that which refuses to distinguish between the facticity of authentic human presence and the lifelike operation of an anthropoid chat interface. In each case, it is to forfeit the vocabulary of the singular, unique, and inextricably local, and to replace it with one which speaks only the language of what is repeatable, generalizable, and transportable."