It might sound like a Monty Python sketch updated for 2026: Artificial Intelligence vs. German philosophers. The question to be settled is what it means to be human in an age when AI becomes more intelligent than we are.

The German philosopher in this case is Rüdiger Safranski, who has written a treatise (not yet published in English) titled , which translates roughly to the “fourth blow.”Safranski is alluding to an essay written by Sigmund Freud in 1917, in which the father of psychoanalysis stipulated that “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe ” from the advance of science. means something between blow, affront and humiliation.

The first humiliation, according to Freud, was Nicolaus Copernicus’ cosmological slight: Suddenly the sun was at the center of the universe, and we were just orbiting around it, which wasn’t the impression the Bible had given us.

The second was Charles Darwin’s biological insult: Rather than being the crown of creation, as in Genesis, we descend from the same ancestors as apes.

The third humiliation, Freud immodestly argued, was his own realization that the human ego “is not master in its own house,” because what ultimately guides our mental life is not our reason or will but our unconscious.

And now Safranski coins the fourth affront: This is the shocking insight that intelligence can no longer be the quality that makes us special as humans, because machines made of dead matter will outdo us in many, if not all, cognitive and intellectual domains. This blow is especially humiliating because we made those machines.

With this framing of the emerging psychological and ontological tension between humans and their greatest (or worst) creation, Safranski is pitching right into the zeitgeist, dominated as it is by angst about AI — its effects on labor markets, weapons of mass destruction, social dislocation and much else, up to and including our humanity.

Many people who consider themselves humanists are worried. (Humanism, originally a Renaissance movement, gives priority in all matters to individual human dignity, agency, experience and flourishing, rather than, say, God, ideology or technology.) The Indian author Arundhati Roy, for example, frets that “the triumph of AI will be a crime against humanness.”

Our situation, Roy thinks, “feels a little like that moment before the tsunami in 2004. Remember how, in Thailand and Indonesia, the ocean drew back from the coastline? People ran out to marvel at the miles of pristine new beach that suddenly emerged, not realizing that, far out at sea, a wall of water was building up and would come crashing over them. We’re in that moment now.”She worries, for instance, about what will happen to future generations who increasingly outsource their relationships and inner worlds to AI.

Will they “experience the impossible pain and ecstatic pleasure of solving a math equation or creating art or literature or music of its own — however flawed?”Will they feel fully human, as we understand that feeling today?

Safranski, perhaps surprisingly for a German philosopher, comes to the rescue with an erudite optimism. After all, those first three affronts to human narcissism, contrary to fears among contemporaries, did not abase us as a species, but arguably elevated us to new heights.

What AI is demonstrating, Safranski argues, is that we made a mistake after those three earlier shocks in thinking that intelligence is the thing that makes us special, when instead that honor belongs to spirit They are not the same. AI may be intelligent, but it’s not conscious: It does not know that it knows. Nor does it have an interior world, as we do when we suffer, hope or fear; when we become bored or embarrassed, worry about death or feel compassion, agonize over moral dilemmas or wonder what kind of beings we are and what the point of it all is.

To Safranski, we are “living spirit” whereas AI is “dead spirit.”The risk, according to Safranski, is not that AI destroys or enslaves us, but that we mistake its increasingly masterful of humanity for the real thing.

Safranski, who is also the author of a monograph on the German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann, evokes Hoffmann’s classic horror story ,published in 1816. In it, a young man named Nathanael falls in love with a woman, Olimpia. When she turns out to be a robot, Nathanael goes mad.

That could be our fate too, but only to the extent that we anthropomorphize our new technology, ascribing morality, feelings, humor and the like to our large-language models, instead of realizing that those are merely recognizing all those qualities as patterns that we have created and then playing them back to us.

Safranski’s argument has an obvious flaw. He simply assumes that AI, which has now entered the phase of “recursive self-improvement” and can keep making itself better, can never become conscious and, once conscious, evolve . That’s presumptuous, especially since we are only just beginning to understand what consciousness even is.

The flaw is not fatal to his thesis. Safranski’s contribution is to provide reassurance in a time of angst. His message reminds me of a story about the Buddha, who once told a disciple that when someone points at the moon, it would be foolish to look at the finger: Not only would we miss the moon, we’d also be mistaken about the finger. AI is the finger; humanness is the moon.