The Shame of Being Human: How an Obscure 1940s Essay Explains Our AI Anxiety

In the late 1940s, long before anyone had heard of chatbots or large language models, the German cultural critic Gunther Anders sat in an exhibition of technology in the United States and noticed something strange happening to his companion, a friend he called T. As they moved past displays of gleaming machines, T became visibly uncomfortable. He was not frightened, exactly. He was ashamed. Anders would later give this feeling a name that has proven startlingly prophetic: Promethean shame, the shame a person feels when confronted by the humiliatingly high quality of the things they have made. In a new editorial marking the fortieth anniversary of the journal AI & Society, philosopher Robert Sparrow of Monash University argues that this forgotten emotion is now the hidden engine of contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, and that until we recognise it, we will keep misreading what AI really means for humanity.

Anders was writing at a moment of vertiginous technological change, when the first electronic computers were being unveiled to a public still reeling from the atomic bomb. He saw that people standing before these machines experienced an unfamiliar mixture of awe and self-doubt. Humans, he observed, are inferior to their technological appliances in strength, speed and precision, in much the same way that human thinking fares badly against the thinking power of computing machines. T’s response to this realisation was not simply intellectual. It registered in his body, in a sense of standing clumsily and imprecisely under the gaze of perfect devices. Anders described the shame as being about having naturally grown rather than having been made, about owing one’s existence to the blind, uncalculated, archaic process of procreation and birth, in stark contrast to immaculate products that are carefully designed through and through.

The concept remained obscure for decades. The provocative essay in which Anders identified Promethean shame was first translated into English only in 2016, and a full translation of the book in which it appeared, The Obsolescence of the Human, has only just been published by University of Minnesota Press. Sparrow argues this delay is unfortunate, because Promethean shame is all too evident in contemporary social, political and philosophical responses to AI. If the room-sized computers of the 1940s were enough to provoke the emotion in a few sensitive observers, the intelligent machines of today evoke it nearly universally, and the cultural consequences are everywhere to be seen.

Consider the rhetoric that now surrounds artificial intelligence. Breathless claims about superhuman performance are a staple of both popular and academic writing on almost any topic. We are constantly told we must get ready for AI, that we must dedicate ourselves to understanding it, and that it is inevitable humans will have to make way for AI and robots as they take our jobs. Leading philosophers insist there is a not-insignificant chance AI will become thousands of times smarter than us, that we might outsource our conscience to machines, and that we should live in fear of being turned into paperclips. Prominent scientists argue the future belongs to machines and that our only recourse is to leave our bodies behind as mind uploads in virtual worlds, or as digital simulations derived from our social media profiles. Sparrow notes that Marvin Minsky’s famous quip about future computers, that if we are lucky they might decide to keep us as pets, captures the vibe of contemporary AI discussion and stands as pithy an expression of Promethean shame as anything Anders himself coined.

But Anders’s analysis goes deeper than rhetorical excess. He argued that Promethean shame expresses a fundamental change in our sense of what it means to be human. New technologies establish new tasks for us, tasks for which our evolved bodies and minds are poorly suited. A pilot landing a jet must make complex decisions in split seconds. A student who wants to use AI to review the philosophical literature responsibly must, in order to check the results, possess a knowledge of that literature which by hypothesis they lack, and which may in fact be impossible to acquire. In this new world, humans in their natural state appear as faulty constructions when measured against the tasks they face. Yet, as Anders pointedly observed, humans can only be considered constructions, faulty ones even, once they are classed as machines. The comparison itself smuggles in a dehumanising premise.

Sparrow finds this logic at work in the way computational metaphors have colonised human self-understanding. Machine intelligence must be possible, we are told, because we are just machines made of meat. He detects it too in a subtle rhetorical manoeuvre: complex, multidimensional human activities are redescribed in narrow, quantifiable terms that machines can perform, and then we are told the machines do it better than we do. And he perceives it in proposals to hand over roles once considered quintessentially human, requiring touch and physical comfort, to machines, whether as sexual partners, digital friends, or caregivers for the elderly. Each case involves quietly shrinking the definition of a human task until a machine can be declared its superior.

Perhaps the most striking part of Anders’s argument concerns freedom. He noticed that the world of fabricated products presents itself as indefinite, open and malleable, daily intent on reforming itself and adapting to new situations, while the human body remains what it always was, still yesterday’s body, still the body of our parents and ancestors, indistinguishable from that of a troglodyte. Seen from the perspective of machines, the body looks conservative, anti-progressive, obsolete and unchangeable, a dead weight in the rise of machines. The result is a strange inversion: the machine’s potentials are nurtured, giving it a free hand becomes a duty, and stifling its potential becomes an immoral deed. The machine presents itself as the subject of desire and demand, expecting humans to exert themselves to come up with ever better offers. Anders summarised the inversion bluntly: things are free, and human beings are unfree.

This inversion, Sparrow suggests, is even more evident today than when Anders was writing. Where people once believed in the progressive force of human reason, it is now widely believed that technology makes revolutions, not people. The future, we are told, belongs to spiritual machines, with humans along for the ride if we are included at all. Our most urgent task, on this view, becomes ensuring that the superintelligences destined to control humanity’s fate will be friendly to us. Anders also linked Promethean shame to what he called human engineering, the project we now call transhumanism. Humans, he wrote, are deserting to the camp of their machines, having convinced themselves that machines are ontologically superior to beings who are born. They want to make themselves because they no longer want to be something not-made, feeling indignant not that they were made by others but that they were not made at all. Sparrow observes that one would be hard pressed to find a better description of today’s tech billionaires and their transhumanist enablers, with their obsession with designer babies, robots, mind uploading and immortality. In Anders’s arch formulation, the experiments of human engineering are the initiation rites of the robotic age.

There is a final, darker twist. Like shame more generally, the lack of self-confidence associated with Promethean shame leads us to behave in ways that make things worse. The more miserable humans become in trying to keep pace with their creations, the more frantically they multiply the bureaucracy of machines, sub-machines and sub-sub-machines, which in turn deepens their misery. What appears to be liberation from the tyranny of nature may result in an unprecedented subjugation to technology, as Oliver Rachello has suggested in drawing lessons from Anders for AI ethics. Anders himself put it starkly: humans turned themselves into masters only to find a new way to become slaves.

Escaping this trap, Sparrow concludes, will require serious cultural self-work, some of which he hopes will take place in the pages of AI & Society. The remedy he proposes is disarmingly simple in principle. We are not machines, and we need feel no shame when lifeless things perform exactly as we have designed them to perform. That we are born rather than made is, as Hannah Arendt argued, a condition of our freedom and our agency, not a defect to be regretted. The urgent task of building a world in which our creations serve us, rather than us serving them, begins with recognising and overcoming Promethean shame. Seventy-five years after T stood blushing before a wall of vacuum tubes, the emotion he felt has become the unacknowledged background hum of the AI age, and naming it may be the first step toward thinking clearly about the machines we have made.

Subject of Research: Promethean shame and the philosophical response to artificial intelligence

Article Title: AI and Promethean shame

Article References: Sparrow, R. (2026). AI and Promethean shame. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03371-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03371-5

Keywords: artificial intelligence, Promethean shame, Gunther Anders, philosophy of technology, transhumanism, AI & Society, Robert Sparrow, human obsolescence, machine intelligence, mind uploading, AI ethics, human dignity