Cosmologies of the Anthropocene

In the AI Story

The book closes the arc of Vetlesen's career: from Perception, Empathy, and Judgment through Evil and Human Agency through A Philosophy of Pain to the extension of the framework to the environmental domain. The structural claim is consistent: moral perception requires vulnerability, vulnerability is attenuated by specific social and technological arrangements, and the attenuation produces catastrophes visible in retrospect but invisible to their perpetrators.

The relevance to AI is twofold. First, AI is being deployed in environmental contexts (climate modeling, agricultural optimization, resource allocation) and its effects depend on whether its designers can perceive the non-human vulnerability its outputs affect. Second, AI is itself a massive environmental actor: the data centers that train frontier models consume water and energy at scales the industry systematically obscures. The smooth interface conceals its material substrate.

Vetlesen's environmental analysis converges with the nocturnal body diagnosis developed by Achille Mbembe: both identify the structural concealment of the costs of smooth consumption, and both insist that moral perception requires attention to what the interface has rendered invisible.

The book's extension of vulnerability beyond the human is philosophically contested within Vetlesen's own tradition. The anthropocentric core of Levinasian ethics — the face of the Other as specifically human face — resists the extension. Vetlesen's response is that the face is a phenomenological category, not a biological one: the capacity to perceive vulnerability in the non-human is a developed capacity, and its development is what the environmental crisis most urgently requires.

Origin

Published by Routledge in 2019, the book synthesizes two decades of Vetlesen's phenomenological and ethical work with contemporary environmental philosophy, animist scholarship, and Anthropocene studies. It marks Vetlesen's most ambitious attempt to extend his core framework beyond the human domain.

Key Ideas

Environmental crisis as perceptual crisis. The catastrophe is visible in its effects but invisible to the perceivers whose cosmology does not include non-human vulnerability.

The extension of moral perception. The phenomenological face — the site of moral demand — is not biologically restricted to the human. Its extension is the work environmental ethics requires.

AI's material substrate. Smooth digital interfaces conceal data-center water and energy costs that moral perception, if developed, would register as material.

Structural consistency with the evil book. The same mechanism — numbing of empathic perception — produces both collective evildoing and environmental catastrophe.