CONCEPT
Cosmotechnics
The unification, within a given culture, of the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities — every technology encodes a metaphysics.
Cosmotechnics is Yuk Hui's foundational concept for the thesis that different civilizations produce fundamentally different relationships between technology and the cosmic order. It dissolves the assumption that technological modernization follows a single universal trajectory, revealing instead that every tool carries within it an answer to the question of what the universe is and what human beings owe it. The Western cosmotechnical tradition, rooted in the Greek separation of techne from physis and radicalized by Enlightenment mechanism, treats nature as standing reserve and technology as mastery. Chinese cosmotechnics, grounded in Daoist and Confucian thought, understands technology as participation in the self-generating processes of the Dao. The concept challenges the AI industry's assumption that large language models are universal tools—they are, Hui argues, Western tools, encoding the cosmotechnical assumptions of their builders.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged from Hui's sustained engagement with two philosophical traditions rarely brought into dialogue: Continental philosophy of technology (Heidegger's Gestell, Simondon's individuation, Stiegler's pharmacology) and Chinese philosophy (Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, twentieth-century modernization