Now available in English—one of the twentieth century’s most important works on the philosophy of technology
With this first English translation of influential German philosopher Günther Anders’s 1956 masterpiece of critical theory, The Obsolescence of the Human, a new generation of readers can now engage with his prescient and haunting vision of a “world without us” dominated by technology.
Looking at technological events such as the detonation of the nuclear bomb and the arrival of televisions in our living rooms, Anders advances a warning of what humanity looks like in a world where it has surrendered all agency. He outlines the new emotional landscapes that shape our relationship to increasingly capable technology, including Promethean shame, the human sense of unease our own superior technological innovations can instill. Confronting the growing gap between what we can collectively create and what we can individually comprehend, Anders speculates on the trajectory of a developing technological world that rapidly exceeds our ability to control or even foresee its negative consequences. The Obsolescence of the Human prefigures contemporary posthumanist discourse and is eerily predictive of current debates around automation, global warming, and artificial intelligence. Providing new ways to conceptualize the intersection of technology and emotion, it offers groundbreaking frameworks for future-oriented ethics. Radical in both its stylistic experimentation and its theoretical insights, this new translation presents a cautionary tale regarding the human capacity to usher in its own destruction. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
Günther Anders (born Günther Siegmund Stern) was a German philosopher, journalist, essayist and poet. He was trained in the phenomenological tradition, he developed a philosophical anthropology for the age of technology, focusing on such themes as the effects of mass media on our emotional and ethical existence, the illogic of religion, the nuclear threat, the Shoah, and the question of being a philosopher. In 1992, shortly before his death, Günther Anders was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize.
Both the blurb and the editors’ introduction of Günther Anders’ The Obsolescence of the Human are at pains to frame the book as prescient. And understandably so – Anders’ monumental critique of modern technology was written in 1956 and only translated into English in 2025. Given the rate of change in our technical environment, a book written seventy years ago is like a satellite signal from the remotest regions of interstellar space – you’d be forgiven for asking whether the world it is addressed to still exists.
Thankfully, this emphasis on prescience is not — or not only — a promotional imperative. Anders’ book is, in fact, deeply prescient. It speaks directly and compellingly to a world of “automation, global warming and artificial intelligence,” as the back cover assures us, even though its principal reference points are radio and television.
However, I want to argue that the book is more than just prescient – in fact, to overemphasise its prescience is to diminish its importance. That’s because prescience is itself a limiting category, and one that fails to capture the real importance of Anders’ work for a contemporary readership.
Prescience is, literally, foreknowledge. When we say a work is prescient, we mean that it articulated something we now know to be true, or it described a situation that is now unquestionably ours, and it did so before such knowledge was widespread, before this situation was fully established.
However, this risks framing the work as an intellectual curiosity, a kind of conceptual conjuring trick. We can be amazed by the predictive accuracy and the insight of the author, even as we know that what they have to tell us has been said more fully, more clearly and more accurately in the subsequent years.
So while I do think Anders’ book is prescient, for reasons I’ll explain below, I think it has a far more important and compelling quality: it tells us something that we still do not know. It manages to make visible and comprehensible something that we have succeeded in repressing. Above all, it tells us, across a distance of seven decades, that this occlusion, this forgetting, this blindness, is the defining symptom of our era.
Let’s start, however, with prescience.
First and foremost, Anders was able to capture the ways that, in bringing the world closer to us, in placing it firmly within our grasp, modern technology screens out, in advance, anything that cannot be easily assimilated to the dominant technical framework. Anders account of this pre-formatting of experience — which he calls “cozification” – readily describes the dubious benefits of the content economy. Our phone screens give us the world in our hands, yes. But they do so on condition that any particular aspect of the world must be reduced to fit a six-inch frame, conveyed in a thirty-second video loop, and integrated into predictive recommendation engines and programmatic advertising delivery networks that always have the next piece of the world lined up ready for us. And the next, and the next, and the next.
Anders also pre-emptively identifies the “dis-individuating” (to borrow Bernard Stiegler’s term) effects of modern technology. To keep with our existing example (though Anders also extends his discussion into industrialised labour practices), the pre-formatting of our encounter with the world on a handheld screen also tends to diminish the range of responses we can have to it. The disproportion between our capacity to receive information — now effectively boundless — and the limited ways in which we can engage with this information neutralises and equalises our reactions in advance. We are all forced to adopt a similar, narrow range of reactions to a dizzingly broad range of stimuli, and our capacities for active self-formation correspondingly dwindle.
Finally, and most remarkably, Anders’ develops the concept of a “Promethean gradient” — that is, a growing disproportion between our own capacities and those of our tools, which we experience in the form of shame. Anders’ observes that our response to this disproportion — for instance, the ability of machines to perform physical and cognitive tasks rapidly and continuously without tiring or making mistakes — is often to forcibly adapt ourselves to machinic models of behaviour. We try to become more efficient, more productive, more capable of performing repeated and highly patterned actions or cognitive tasks without mistake or deviation, with limited rest and minimal breaks, in the hopes of reducing this shameful gap between our capacities and those of our tools.
And what else is at the root of the growing adoption of LLM-powered chatbots in the workplace, if not the ongoing desire to alleviate the bottleneck in workplace productivity represented by the slow, mistake-prone, recalcitrant human being?
All this is no doubt important and valuable. On its own, it would make the book more than worth reading in 2025. However, it is when Anders’ identifies the technical object that most fully emblematises the Promethean gradient that he moves beyond (mere) prescience.
This primary object is, for Anders, the atomic bomb.
The atomic bomb, in Anders’ framing, represents the absolute disjunction between human ends and the technical system we have contrived to serve these ends. For the end of the bomb — it purpose, its utility, its “outcome” – is precisely the end of humanity as such. The bomb is a truly terminal technology. Its annihilating power renders the capacity of any individual human being an utter irrelevance. Between its power and our own, there is no basis for comparison whatsoever.
As Anders puts it, “if the bomb were to be used, even its smallest effect would already be greater than any human end, be it political or military, regardless of how great such an end may be.” Or, as he reformulates the point in Latin: effectus transcendit finem. The effect transcends any and all ends. Humanity has rendered itself the disposable adjunct to its own ultimate tool.
On this basis, Anders argues that the bomb constitutively and necessarily escapes our notice. In its scale, in its excessiveness, in the way it supersedes and makes a mockery of all human ends, it cannot be assimilated into our daily acts or our moral concerns. It sits beyond and outside our plans and our hopes, the quotidian experience of navigating our lives and constructing a future for ourselves.
And so, in a world in which instrumental attitudes continue to predominate, it can only fade from notice. After all, “the things I can’t do anything about are none of my concern”. We cannot concern ourselves with the bomb — hence, we do not even fear it. We are, as Anders puts it, apocalypse blind.
In making this argument, Anders exceeds what we would usually call prescience. Because, in fact, what he iidentifies here is precisely not something that we have since come to know and to understand. Instead, he makes plain the ways in which we have failed to come to know, we have failed to come to understand the bomb as the definitive technology of our era, as the telos of the technological civilisation we have become over the past two hundred years.
Because after all, what is the bomb for us, today? In a geopolitical and military sense, as much as in a cultural one, it appears to us as a relic — an artefact of a moment that is no longer ours. In an environment saturated by historical fictions, it is just one narrative device among others. Spectacular, no doubt, and memorable. But hardly a concern for us, for our lives, for our futures — or the absence thereof.
Of course, you can say I'm being excessive. No doubt military officials and political representatives take the bomb very seriously. The stockpiles still exist, and some small number of nuclear warheads – so-called "broken arrows" – remain unaccounted for. So who am I talking about, exactly? Who is this “us” for whom the bomb does not register as an object of concern?
Perhaps, in the end, I should speak only for myself.
I was born before the Berlin Wall fell, but I don’t remember it. I count myself among the children of the end of history – not quite the “generation that calls itself last”, as Franco Berardi describes Gen Z, but nevertheless someone for whom the great antagonisms that moved the historical process forward, and the meta-narratives they sustained, are not even memories.
My first political memory was the Labour landslide of 1997, though it’s a memory appropriately void of any real political content. I didn’t know what a landslide was; I didn’t know what it meant for there to be a Labour government after 18 years of Tory rule. But I do remember television images of Tony Blair entering Downing Street. I remember the chorus of D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better”, Labour’s campaign song and the unofficial anthem of neoliberal triumphalism. The line goes up forever — we foresee only the indefinite perpetuation of economic growth, and political consensus is now all but guaranteed.
Somewhere, no doubt, a cynical voice was still singing the closing lines of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. But I couldn’t hear them.
What could the bomb mean for me, and for those like me, then? Only the insanity of a world now thankfully left behind, a now-closed chapter of world history in which superpowers confronted each other with arsenals sufficient to destroy the earth many times over. We could only hope that the Blairs and Clintons had it right, that the book of history itself, its dismaying story driven forward by violence and bloodshed in endless ascent, had turned its final page.
I learned about the Cuban Missile Crisis in history class when I was 15 or 16. This would have been in the first years of the new millennium, after yet another apocalypse had failed to materialise. The fear, the panic, that accompanied the threat of nuclear war was, for me, an empathetic leap too far. The drills and warnings, the emergency broadcasts and test patterns that marked the age of mutually assured destruction seemed as quaint as the TV shows they interrupted.
And then I went home from school and turned on the computer. I booted Windows 95 and connected to the internet. The modem sang its synthetic birdsong down the telephone line and there it was — everything, all at once. The absolute contemporaneity of the world and all it had to offer. Plurality without conflict or division. I sat, fully saturated in the flow of information, and knew that the future was already here and nothing could ever change.
Naturally, I did not know that the foundation of the internet lay in the US military’s need for a command and control network that would keep functioning even if the Soviets launched a pre-emptive strike at key military targets. Only a fully distributed network could launch the necessary counter-attack if the centres of power were obliterated — and so, the US Department of Defense developed ARPANET, the progenitor of the modern web.
It is on the basis of this genealogy that Jonathan Crary describes the “internet complex” (as analogous to the military-industrial complex) as “a system whose functionality is not only divorced from any human context but expressly designed for circumstances when society and its members no longer meaningfully exist.”
Nor did I know that the semiconductors processing the data sent and received along my phone line first became commercially viable thanks to massive investment by the US military, who needed miniaturised computers to power the guidance systems of their ICBMs. Had it not been necessary to effectively target and eliminate urban centres half a continent away, it is hard to know whether the home computer would have ever become a reality, much less a de facto condition of social existence.
And above all, I was completely unaware that the most fundamental advancements in modern computing stemmed from the need to accurately model fluid dynamics when designing the first hydrogen bomb. While the Manhattan Project could still largely rely on (mostly female) human workers employed specifically to do sequential calculations — the original meaning of the term “computer”, as in, a person who computes – this was not going suffice if we wanted to graduate from kiloton to megaton payloads. Only an automated electronic computer would suffice to produce truly world-annihilating weapons systems.
I didn’t know these things, did not have cause to think of them. Instead, the world came to me, on my flickering CRT monitor in the little spare room at the top of the stairs, in its absolute abundance. And wasn’t that more than enough?
Over the subsequent two decades, my ignorance on this score has been at least partially remediated. Meanwhile, the internet complex – and the mass-scale computation that powers it – has come to dominate the world and to entirely delimit our capacity to imagine a future. The line goes up, so what could it matter? After all, the bombs stayed in their silos, didn’t they?
Well, yes and no.
Anders argued, ultimately, that it didn’t matter if the bomb was actually used or not. By simply existing, it had its effect. The actuality of the bomb forces us to live in a world in which annihilation is the perpetual and unspoken horizon of all our actions, all our expectations.
The omnipresence of the internet complex is a confirmation of this fact — as is the widespread apocalypse blindness that accompanies and conceals it. We live in a world designed for our absence, and each year the Promethean gradient gets steeper. We continue to hope that by becoming more machine-like ourselves, more effectively able to integrate with the tools that outpace and outperform us, we will preserve some role for ourselves in the world that we are rushing headlong towards.
In fact, the opposite is likely true. But let us try to end on a hopeful note.
Anders argued that there was a way out of our apocalypse blindness: an active expansion of our moral imagination. We must undertake the “voluntary expansion of the capacity of our feeling” in order to make the bomb an object of our experience, and hence something amenable to control and constraint.
Certainly, this is not a simple task. Anders speaks of spiritual exercises. He invokes art as a “device that helps us expand the capacity of our own souls”. But he does not give us instructions, he does not offer a programme.
Instead, he gives us a choice: work to make yourself capable of understanding the bomb — affectively, intellectually, emotionally — or accept that the human has no future.
In making this injunction palpable, in compelling us to choose, Anders’ work is far more than prescient. It is, instead, that much rarer thing: transformative.