Heidegger Waiting on an AI Threshold Event: Beyond the Empirical Turn in Philosophy of Technology

Abstract As Philosophy of Technology is increasingly mobilized to address artificial intelligence, much scholarship—whether utopian, catastrophist, or explicitly anti-singularitarian—remains structured by the ontology and temporality of a future AI threshold event. This paper argues that such futural orientations sustain a potentially hazardous form of “awaiting”: ethical reflection becomes predictive and solutionist, oriented to determinate risks presumed to materialize as future empirical dangers and threats. Against this backdrop, I diagnose a tendency within the “empirical turn” and post-phenomenological AI ethics toward what I call “ontic solutionism”: an approach bracketing ontology, narrowing attention to artifacts and measurable future harms, and thereby obscuring dangers that remain indeterminate in the present. Re-reading Heidegger—despite his exclusion from much post-phenomenological self-definition—I show that neglect of his concept of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) underwrites familiar charges of techno-pessimism and determinism, and blocks key “reversals” (Umkehrungen) needed to grasp AI’s deeper threat: technologically induced nihilism. Developing Heidegger’s crucial distinctions between “awaiting” (erwarten) and “waiting” (warten), and between “advent” (Ankunft) and “event” (Ereignis), I propose a non-predictive orientation to AI as event in the present: a disciplined, non-willing readiness attuned to indeterminacy, which avoids pessimistic resignation in the face of techno-determinism. This stance does not abandon ontic interventions, but re-grounds AI ethics ontologically, clarifying how successful empirical safeguards may intensify the very technological disclosure they seek to manage. Data Availability Not applicable. Notes Most notably, Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do (1972), together with studies by Thomson (2025), Gertz (2024), and Winograd and Flores (1986) all of which explicitly interpret AI through a Heideggerian lens. This literature also builds upon broader work in philosophy of technology that considers Heidegger, including Borgmann (1984) and, more recently, Babich (2021). I distinguish “ontic solutionism” from “techno-solutionism” (Morozov, 2013; Eubanks, 2018), though the former may lead to the latter. Techno-solutionism overstates technology’s problem-solving power; ontic solutionism misrepresents technology by bracketing the ontological horizon in which technology operates. Across his corpus, Martin Heidegger (1977) has numerous, detailed analyses of concrete artifacts. In Being and Time, the famous analysis of the hammer (¶15–18) introduces readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, the peasant shoes exemplify how a thing discloses a world. In “The Thing”, he meditates on the jug, while “Building Dwelling Thinking” (2001a) reflects on the bridge as gathering the fourfold. Most explicitly, “The Question Concerning Technology” contrasts the traditional windmill with the hydroelectric plant on the Rhine to articulate “enframing” (Gestell). Even earlier lecture courses, such as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, revisit tools and equipment. A recent publication of the Journal of Human and Technology Relations, “Postphenomenology in the Age of AI: Prospects, Challenges, Opportunities" (Ed. Mykhailov) represents some of the most current strands of research applying post-phenomenology to AI, and is overwhelmingly empirical in content and approach. There is some consideration of Heidegger, yet his ontology tends to be flattened in favour of ontic mediation, co-constitution and embodied interaction. The term “indeterminacy” appears only rarely (Ihde, 1990, p. 139; 1991, 70; 2001, 31; 2008, 29), and never in relation to Heidegger’s Unbestimmtheit. When discussed, it is treated in an ontic sense—as an unknown that can, in principle, be observed and resolved. It is not addressed as an irreducible ontological limit. Ihde comes closest in Technology and the Lifeworld, where he notes a “structural ambiguity” complicating human control. Although Ihde (2010) engages terms like “withdrawal” and “concealment/unconcealment,” Verbeek does address the tendency to reify concealment (2005, 50), yet overall he tends to privilege revealing and “bringing-forth,” and thus elaborates “unconcealment”, or the “emergence of out of concealment into unconcealment” with less emphasis on “concealment” as an irreducible indeterminate valence of disclosure. Heidegger’s (2018) use of “determinacy” (Bestimmtheit) and “indeterminacy” (Unbestimmtheit), though rarely highlighted in commentary, helps distinguish the ontic from the ontological. In Being and Time he contrasts Dasein with entities that bear “determinate significations” (26; GA 2:9); he distinguishes “determinate” fear (furcht) from the “completely indefinite (unbestimmt)” character of Angst (230; GA 2:247); he contrasts determinate values with “care” (Sorge) (132; GA 2:133); and opposes “determinate” judgments to the lived experience of equipment (89; GA 2:83). He also calls objective spatial magnitudes “determinate categorical [kategoriale Bestimmung] characteristics” (139; GA 2:140), and temporal magnitudes are “determinate temporal character [Zeitbestimmtheit]” (247; GA 2:270). Crucially, Heidegger stresses that “indeterminacy” does not exclude “determinacy” (2018, 14; GA 9:120). Dwayne Woods (2025) highlights this complexity in his “Optimizing beyond Optimization: Heideggerian Limits and Artificial Intelligence”. Other notions that demand a consideration of indeterminacy, include: “nothing” (das Nichts), “withdrawal” (Entzug), “releasement” (Gelassenheit), “unconcealment” (Unverbogenheit), “earth” (Erde), “non-willing”, and “poetic language”. In “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger states that “destining is never a fate that compels.” Geschick is not efficient causality, historical inevitability, or teleological necessity. It names the way Being grants a historical clearing in which entities can appear and make sense. This granting opens possibilities rather than determining outcomes. Every disclosure, however, entails concealment: Being withdraws even in revealing. This structural “withdrawal” (Entzug) preserves indeterminacy, ensuring that no historical configuration is closed or fully fixed. History is structured, but never exhaustively determined. I do not claim that appealing to indeterminacy simply refutes the charge of determinism, as if the former were the opposite of the latter. Rather, taking Heidegger’s ontological indeterminacy seriously dissolves the binary itself. Indeterminacy is not the absence of necessity but the structural withdrawal that conditions disclosure. The opposition between historical necessity and empirical contingency thus presupposes an ontological framework Heidegger’s thinking unsettles. The main claims, all worth serious consideration, are that Heidegger’s ontological view of technology; is monolithic, overly romantic, abstract, overlooks productive, plural, and emancipatory dimensions of technology; Treats modern technology as essentially reductive; Neglects concrete cases where technologies open new forms of engagement. While “optimism” is rarely named outright, post-phenomenological literature frequently foregrounds medical, reproductive, assistive, and digital technologies as enhancing visibility, inclusion, improving society and democracy. Far less attention is given to autonomous weapons, drone warfare, geoengineering militarization, nuclear or cyber catastrophe, and the enormous suffering such systems sustain. Even when military technologies are analyzed as mediations (Verbeek 2021a, b), the focus falls mostly on improved decision-making or operator risk reduction rather than large-scale and often indiscriminate destruction and killing on the receiving end. In this sense, post-phenomenology’s break with classical phenomenology carries an implicit, structurally embedded technological optimism. Mediation theory, with its focus on relational openness, appears hospitable to indeterminacy. Yet where it does appear, its version of indeterminacy is reducible: it designates problems awaiting resolution rather than a constitutive dimension of withdrawal. The uncertainty is epistemic, not structural. It presupposes that greater clarity — empirical, conceptual, or technical — will eventually dissolve ambiguities and technologies can be straightforwardly improved through ethical intervention on the level of the empirical. The implicit conviction being that increased determinacy will settle what presently appears undecidable. These debates, despite their variety, operate within a shared horizon in which indeterminacy is provisional and, in principle, eliminable. The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER, Cambridge) and the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI, Oxford) both focus primarily on “future catastrophic risk” of AI. FHI’s founder, the Oxford AI philosopher Nick Bostrom (2014) in his recent work (Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.)—examining the “far future” of “existential risks” and human extinction scenarios—epitomizes the future-oriented ontic-solutionist approach to AI ethics and risk analysis. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is another similar domain for scholars who focus on survival of “human extinction” scenarios. Heidegger (2008) employs the term erwarten (mostly translated as “awaiting”, sometimes “expecting”) to characterize one’s relation to death as an occurrence happening in the future, (Being and Time, 306; GA 2:347) one that is “not-yet” present, rather than his ontological construal as an event presencing through the ecstatic temporality of “being-towards-death”. Death as a determinate (present-at-hand) happening in the future is an “ontological perversion of making Dasein something “present-at-hand”. (Ibid, 293; GA 2:332). In early works, “anticipation” (Vorlaufen) is the alternative to “awaiting” (erwarten) and is the authentic relation towards death. (Ibid, 308; GA 2:350) In later writings, Heidegger drops Vorlaufen and “waiting” (warten) becomes the authentic alternative to “awaiting” (erwarten). While the terms “turn(ing)” and “reversal” are sometimes used interchangeably in English translations, I keep with Heidegger’s own distinction between the former, which in German is “Kehre”, from the latter, “Umkehr” (sometimes translated as “inversion”). While Kehre as “turning” most often indicates the shift in thinking following Being and Time, I appeal to Umkehr as “reversal” as a change in thought demanded to move from the ontic to the ontological. Heidegger invokes a similar sense of a shift in thinking with his term “Umschlag” as a “flipping over” where ontic categories, and metaphysics comes to appear as what must be left behind (GA 2, 65). It is crucial, however, to distinguish the positive calls for “reversal” (Umkehrung) from “overcoming” (Überwindung)—sometimes also mistranslated as “reversal”. In his third Le Thor Seminar (1969), Heidegger (2021) argues against the translation of “Ereignis” into French as “avènement” (“advent”) (Heidegger, Four Seminars, 60.; GA 15:365). As they share the same Latin roots (adventus, eventus) the French paronyms “avènement” and “evènement” correspond to the English “advent” and “event”, thus we can surmise that Heidegger would also reject “advent” as a translation of “Ereignis”. “Ankunft” is otherwise translated as “arrival” in the sense of an actual “arrival of the Lord on the Day of Judgement” (Phenomenology of Religious Life, 71; GA 60:102), or the arrival of the anti-christ (Ibid., 75; GA 60:106). Especially throughout Contributions, Heidegger plays on the ambiguity of an advent as happening at a specific point in time in the past or future, referring alternatively to “advent and absconding” (Greek beginning followed by lost presence), as well as the “absconding and advent” (lost presence followed by new beginning, i.e., “last gods”). The term is most often used in Being and Time, but also appears later in Contributions, where, also invoking the refusal of closure, Heidegger writes “the essential occurrence of beyng is disclosed as it conceals itself.” Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), 224. (GA 65:285) See Agostino Cera (2020) for an illuminating discussion of the problem of the reduction of questions to problems specifically in post-phenomenology’s rejection of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. John Sallis’ (1973, 391) comment is especially relevant for highlighting the temporality of “reversal”: “It is significant that Heidegger speaks not of the thinking after the reversal but, instead, of the thinking of the reversal.” Sallis, ‘Language and Reversal’, 391. Dreyfus (1993) comes close to naming this reversal—and he too seeks to follow Heidegger beyond ontic technological dangers towards an ontological flattening of meaning—but takes a slight turn towards what he calls a “shared moral space”, which is somewhat orthogonal to my concern. Yet, he recognizes a similar subtlety I wish to draw out, when he follows Heidegger in proposing non-technological practices while recognizing that “just protecting non-technical practices, even if we could succeed, would not give us what we need.” For Heidegger (2008), a “worldview” (Weltanschuang) is a way of representing a determinate world in terms of values, goals, and cultural perspectives. (Being and Time 224, 244, 444; GA 2:238, 265, 518). In Die Überwindung der Metaphysik”, he frames Nietzsche’s thought as a descent into worldview, and later aligns worldview philosophy with ideology and Lebensphilosophie (GA 67:113–122). He calls the phrase “Christian worldview” a contradiction (2004, p.87; GA 60:122) and associates “worldview” with determinacy (p.200; GA 3:284). In “The Word of Nietzsche ‘God is Dead’”, Heidegger writes: “What the will wills it does not merely strive after as something it does not yet have. What the will wills it has already, for the will wills its will. Its will is what it has willed. The will wills itself.” (p.77: GA 5:234). Gertz’ Nihilism and Technology (2024) is one important exception to this tendency in post-phenomenology. Sidorkin (2025) offers an intriguing and powerful Marx-inspired counterpoint to a negative reading of Gestell, where through what he calls “liberatory alienation” AI, while dividing us from certain meaningful practices, might free humans to focus on creativity, joy, and higher-order pursuits. Heidegger maintained a sustained engagement with East Asian thought. In Freiburg, he sought out Chinese and Japanese students to discuss Daoism and Buddhism; he entered into dialogue with D.T. Suzuki and Keiji Nishitani of the Kyoto School; and in the early 1940s he began a partial translation of the Daodejing with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao. On several occasions he suggested that Zen Buddhism stood closer to his own thinking than Western metaphysics (May, 1996; Parkes, 1987), and he speculated that East Asian languages might sustain a non-metaphysical relation to Being—less governed by the subject–object schema of the Western tradition (Heidegger 1982a, b, c). The strands of Asian thought he encountered belong to long traditions preoccupied with volition and the danger of reifying ultimate principles, a concern that resonates with his critique of metaphysical objectification. In their “Circling the Void: Using Heidegger and Lacan to Think about Large Language Models”, Heimann and Hübener (2025) draw a fascinating connection between Heidegger’s notion of Ab-grund and the limits of Large Language Models, arguing that their lack of anxiety, finitude, or a “call of conscience”, which block them from confronting indeterminacy authentically. Hence, AI outputs risk a kind of ontological bad faith: simulating certainty even where certainty is impossible. Relational ontologies have been more characteristic of Asian philosophies, and we should perhaps not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of them such as Buddhism and Daoism incorporate a principle of indeterminacy, such as Nothingness, Emptiness (Sanskrit: śūnyatā; Chinese: 空 kōng), Non-presence (Sanskrit: abhāva / niḥsvabhāvatā; Chinese: 無 wú / 無自性 wú zìxìng), Co-dependent origination (Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda; Chinese: 緣起 yuánqǐ). Where relational ontologies have entered Western philosophies relatively recently, here too we typically find principles of indeterminacy, such as Derrida’s “différance”, “trace”, Lacan’s “real”, Deleuze’s “virtual”, Nancy’s “unground”, Schürmann’s “an-archē”, many often paying homage to Plato’s chora. The term Plato (1997) uses for “stability” is µονίµου (monimos) (Timaeus 49d5–49e4), and insofar as it implies fixity, permanence, or stability — qualities that, for Plato, are necessary for something to be determinately knowable or ontologically complete, we can hear a resonance between his notion of µονίµου and what we refer to as “determinacy”. To be µονίµος is to have a stable ontological identity — a condition of being a determinate thing. Conversely, in this dialogue the sensible elements are in constant flux; they lack determination in the Platonic sense. For both “silence” and “listening”, Heidegger employs an array of associated terms disclosing the complex agency behind these orientations, which does not reduce to a simple lack of activity including “Verschweigen”, suggesting a more active, concealing silence (GA 4:107; 7:224; 12:173; 65: 12, 15, 72, 260, 463). In his Hölderlin interpretations and in Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA 12), the poet engages in “Hören”: to hear, to listen. But we also find “Horchen” (GA 53:81) in the sense of “to listen attentively”, “to hearken”, and in an even stronger sense “gehorchen”, which has the sense of “to listen to” as in “to obey”, invoking an authentic listening to Being as a non-passive appropriation by its call. (GA 39:198) As Kates (2024) writes “Mastery and lack of mastery, he suggested, depended on one and the same framing of technology as instrument, or what [Heidegger] called instrumentality.” Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome nihilism through will as deepening metaphysics. (GA 7:77/“Overcoming Metaphysics,” 92). In On Time and Being: “a regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome (überwinden) metaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself. 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Optimizing beyond optimization: Heideggerian limits and artificial intelligence. AI and Ethics, 5(3), 3143–3157. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback from my colleagues Jason Dockstader and Joel Walmsley. Funding Not applicable. Author information Authors and Affiliations Contributions The work is entirely my own. Corresponding author Ethics declarations Competing interests None. Additional information Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Rights and permissions Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. About this article Cite this article Loughnane, A. Heidegger Waiting on an AI Threshold Event: Beyond the Empirical Turn in Philosophy of Technology. Philos. Technol. 39, 166 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01161-x Received: Accepted: Published: Version of record: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01161-x