PERSON
Yuk Hui
The Hong Kong philosopher who invented the concept of cosmotechnics—the idea that every technology encodes a metaphysics—and who argues that AI’s greatest danger is not superintelligence but the completion of a monotechnologism that is eliminating the diversity of ways human civilizations have related to their tools.
There is no such thing as technology in general. There are only specific technologies, produced by specific civilizations, embedded in specific cosmological frameworks that determine what counts as a tool, what a tool is for, and what relationship properly holds between the human being who wields it and the cosmos in which that wielding takes place. This is the foundational claim of Yuk Hui's philosophy of cosmotechnics—a concept he developed through sustained engagement with both Continental philosophy of technology (Heidegger, Simondon, Stiegler) and Chinese philosophical traditions (Daoist and Neo-Confucian), bringing them into dialogue for the first time at the level of ontology. Hui's argument is not that Western technology is wrong but that it has been universalized: extended so completely across the globe through colonial, economic, and computational power that the Western cosmotechnical tradition now appears to be technology itself, while alternative traditions are retrospectively classified as craft, culture, or
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