Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI) and the Paradise That Holds Us Captive

Last night I re-watched Pirates of the Caribbean 3 – At World’s End. “Full bore and into the abyss.” Disney’s homage to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” The battle of the pirates against the underworld in the middle of the maelstrom made me long, just a little, for my home in Norway—for the Moskenesstraumen, the strongest tidal current in the world, which so perfectly stages the mythology of that raw, dynamic, and untamed sea.

But it wasn’t the whirlpool that set my thoughts in motion this time—it was Calypso. Her mixture of power, seduction, promise, and unpredictability. And if you look closely today, you will recognize that this archetype lives far deeper in our time than we care to admit. While Jack Sparrow wrestles once more with an impossible decision, and Barbossa steers the ship between “up and down,” the question that once troubled Odysseus arose in me again: How does one leave a paradise that holds you captive?

In Homer’s Odyssey, Calypso keeps Odysseus on her island and offers him a seemingly perfect life: no pain, no aging, no difficult decisions. An eternal, static now. It is no coincidence that Odysseus nevertheless chooses to leave. He prefers mortality to paralysis. He chooses agency over comfort.

Today Calypso wears a new dress. She no longer lures with a lonely island, but with technological frictionlessness: algorithmically curated feeds that predict our every desire; closeness that never disappoints; endless scrolls that gently lull us into inactivity. AI does not whisper for us to surrender. It whispers: “You don’t have to decide. The next video is already waiting.”  Down into the algorithmic abyss.

The island of Ogygia is now digital. It is a place where we believe we feel at ease. A place that mirrors us—but does not challenge us. And it is precisely here that our present begins, in the diagnosis that Adorno and Horkheimer offered in Dialectic of Enlightenment. They warned that technological progress does not automatically yield freedom but can turn into new forms of unfreedom. Enlightenment, they argued, reverts into myth. Reason ends in a new kind of bondage.
The myth has returned—only this time it is made of code.

Yet even this thought is no longer sufficient. Adorno and Horkheimer were right to reveal the darker side of technology, but they viewed it solely through the lens of domination. But technology has always been both: a means of control and a lever of liberation. Since writing, since the steam engine, since radio, it has never been unequivocal. The question is how we deal with its ambivalence.

This ambivalence manifests today in the fact that we must extend our inner capacities technologically in order to remain functional in the outer world. The world we have created with technological systems moves faster, more interconnected, and more complexly than our biological condition can handle. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will inevitably accelerate this dynamic.

It is out of this tension that Florian Neukart and I write, in our latest work The Singularity Paradox – Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, about a new way of encountering the technological maelstrom: Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI).
AHI is not an alternative to AGI—it is a consequence of it. When external systems think faster than our own minds, the human being needs ways to grow alongside them—not in the spirit of a fantastical transhumanism that aims to replace humanity, but as a sober question:

How does the human remain capable of action when the world becomes more complex than our biological equipment allows?

We therefore understand AHI as a taking up of evolution itself—as an extension and continuation of those human qualities we cannot fully describe. While AGI creates a new externalized intelligence—perhaps even a new species—on the way toward a potential technological singularity, AHI offers an evolutionary option: a continuation of the “human” story.

This shifts the moral question. It is no longer about whether machines seduce or dominate us, but about whether we can extend ourselves enough to coexist alongside a superior machine intelligence.
AHI is not a capitulation to technology. It is an attempt to carry a fundamental human competence—our aliveness, our perception, our agency, our qualia—into an era in which the boundaries of our biological existence are no longer sufficient.

For when AGI is achieved, when it races technologically toward singularity, the decisive question will not be whether machines possess consciousness—but whether we keep our own.

The core motif remains the same as with Odysseus.
Do we love Calypso, or do we fear her? Perhaps our task is simply to understand why we desire her so deeply. For the real danger lies not in the algorithm, not in AI, and not even in singularity. The real danger lies in our longing to give up responsibility for ourselves.

Thus emerges today a new existentialism—not a search for an uncorrupted and “authentic” human, not a search for who we truly are, but a Vita-Existentialism: a search for life itself.

In our struggle against a reactive undeadness and the associated loss of aliveness and consciousness, we encounter humanity’s final narcissistic injury: the delusion that we could build a divine technological machine while still preserving our reverence—and our love—for Calypso.