CONCEPT
Biophilia and Necrophilia
Fromm's polarity between the love of life and the attraction to the mechanical and controlled — the framework that diagnoses AI as potentially the most powerful necrophilous system ever created.
Biophilia and necrophilia are Fromm's terms, developed most fully in The Heart of Man (1964), for two fundamental orientations toward existence. Biophilia is the love of the living — the attraction to growth, to spontaneity, to the organic and unpredictable, to everything that exhibits the characteristic features of life: change, surprise, irreducible otherness. Necrophilia, in Fromm's broadened sense, is not the pathological fascination with literal death but the attraction to the mechanical — to what can be controlled, predicted, managed. The necrophilous orientation prefers the controllable to the alive, the clean efficiency of mechanism to the messy unpredictability of organic being. AI, in this framework, may be the most powerful necrophilous system ever created.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Fromm distinguished the broadened necrophilic orientation from the narrow clinical phenomenon that shares the name. The pathological necrophile in the psychiatric sense is rare. The characterological necrophilia Fromm described is common — a settled preference for the mechanical over the