YUK HUI'S TECHNICAL PROTENSION AND HEIDEGGER'S "MAKING-PRESENT"​

"You go home after work, tired and sleepy; when you open the door, a freshly made coffee is already there, waiting for you. The machine has prepared the coffee for you before you have DECIDED to have one, because it knows that you would like (or will want) to have one. This is one of the examples of tertiary protension working from a distance, that is to say, of the imaginative [?-OT] force exerted from the outer world. [..] Through the analysis of data --- or, more or less, through speculation --- the machines are able to produce surprises (not just crises) by identifying a probable (and possible) "future," a specific conception of time and space that is always already ahead but that we have not yet projected."

So, humans can no longer confine themselves to "projections," because one is hopeless to compete with a machine at being a machine. What can they do instead? As pointed by Norbert Wiener, humans can instead do what Heidegger called "making-present" -- bringing something forth into the now, without thematization. "Making-present is different from recalling. [In making-present], we are not drawing from memory as if we were searching around inside ourselves for representations. We are not inwardly directed. To the contrary, ...[..] Making-present also means imagination [or empathy -- OT]."




Hui, Y. (2016). On the existence of digital objects (Vol. 48). U of Minnesota Press.

Heidegger, M. (2001). On the essence of truth. The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives, 1, 295-316.

Wiener, N. (1988). The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society (No. 320). Da Capo Press.