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AI Safety and the Path of Neti Neti: Beyond Western Reductionism

The art of saying No: AI Safety with a knife

7 min read

Just now

Dear readers,

Observing the current landscape of Artificial Intelligence, I feel an urgent need to pause and apply a different filter — an ancient form of intellectual hygiene that is desperately missing in today’s AI Management. However, to understand where we are going wrong, we must first understand where we come from.

Our current way of thinking about AI is the legitimate child of Western reductionism, a trajectory that began in the 19th century with Positivism. The idea was seductive: the universe is a machine, and to understand it, one simply needs to dismantle it into its smallest components. If you know the parts, you control the whole.

In the 20th century, this philosophy migrated from textbooks to society, transforming into what I call applied reductionism.
It accompanied mass industrialization (Fordism), where the worker was not a person but a timed task.
It exploded in the 1950s, the decade of cybernetic optimism and the rise of corporations: humans were reduced to “human resources,” social complexity to market statistics, and the first computers — the great…