Present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlikeness
1930 (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag). Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis in Vienna, closing his passage on technical progress in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), 1930, after calling man a kind of prosthetic god. Translated from German.
More from Sigmund Freud · AI and philosophy · AI and culture · Before ChatGPT
Who else?
What it refers to: Humanity's near attainment, through science and technology, of the omnipotence and omniscience it once ascribed to its gods.
Other voices
- “Contemporary technology driven by AI has resurrected the ancient human impulse to play God” Vinay Samuel,
- “The lord of the world becomes the slave of the machine” Oswald Spengler,
- “Organs of the human brain, created by the human hand” Karl Marx,
- “Can be more like a new Renaissance than a new industrial revolution” Sam Altman, Builder,
- “The essence of technology is nothing technological at all” Martin Heidegger,
- “The most spectacular developments in AI currently happen in areas where we need it least” Catrin Misselhorn, Thinker,










