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Ekaterina Kontos-Cohen
Christopher Lasch, American historian and social critic, would have recognized this instinct immediately - not as prudence, but as civilizational disorder.
Christopher Lasch, historian and critic of modern progress ideology.
Image: Hollywood Progressive.
Can AI solve existential problems? Climate change, pandemics, even mortality itself - the modern imagination increasingly answers in the affirmative. Faced with civilizational threats, we turn not to restraint but to scale: more innovation, more data, more optimization. The wager is simple: what human limitation produced, artificial intelligence will transcend.
Though initially associated with the American left, Lasch eventually became a sharp critic of both liberal progressivism and market capitalism, positioning himself within a broader intellectual tradition skeptical of modernity’s faith in endless growth. In The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Lasch describes modernity’s governing myth as the belief in “limitless progress” - the conviction that material expansion and technical knowledge can dissolve the tragic structure of human existence. This tragic structure is known to us all: humans suffer, we age, we die. And we have finite resources. Progress, in this sense, is not merely improvement; it is emancipation from constraint. It promises deliverance from scarcity, suffering, and even mortality. Against this, Lasch counterposes an older moral vocabulary: limits, humility, discipline, stewardship.
What he calls modern society’s “revolt against limits” is not just economic but civilizational. Liberal modernity defines freedom as the absence of restraint: freedom from authority, from tradition, from nature, from the body. But in abolishing external limits, it becomes incapable of recognizing internal or ecological ones. The result is what might be called limit-phobia: a compulsive refusal to accept that some boundaries are constitutive rather than oppressive.
“AI solution-ism” (my term for the tendency to reach for AI tools for all problems) inherits this revolt almost perfectly.
Rows of servers inside a hyperscale data center.
Image: Pexels.
Take climate change — the paradigmatic existential threat. At its core, the climate crisis is a story about limits violated: atmospheric thresholds exceeded, extractive growth unrestrained, consumption untethered. It is the ecological bill coming due for a civilization organized around expansion without end.
Yet the dominant technological response increasingly bypasses any notion of restraint. Rather than consuming less, we propose carbon capture at a planetary scale. Rather than reorganizing the political economy, we imagine geoengineering the sky. Rather than accepting energy descent, we build AI systems to optimize grids, markets, and resource extraction with ever finer precision.
A sympathetic reader might object that technological mitigation and restraint are not mutually exclusive. AI could, in principle, help societies live within planetary limits. Yet the economic context in which these systems emerge complicates this hope. Capitalism treats limits as barriers to expansion, and the firms building AI are necessarily incentivized to maximize the profitability of their technologies rather than to help societies live within limits.
The dream here is not ecological restraint but technical mastery.
Lasch warns precisely against this mentality. He distinguishes hope from optimism: hope is rooted in moral effort within limits; optimism is faith that structural or technological forces will save us regardless of virtue. Lasch suggests that belief in progress came to function as a secularized form of Providence - a conviction that history itself would deliver redemption through continuous improvement.
AI now functions as progress’s latest vessel.
Where industrial capitalism promised abundance, AI promises omniscience. Where earlier technocracies sought efficiency, AI promises prediction — the elimination of uncertainty itself. Disease outbreaks will be forecast before emergence. Agricultural yields will be algorithmically maximized. Climate systems will be simulated, managed, perhaps stabilized.
Industrial smokestacks releasing emissions.
Image: Pexels.
Existential risk becomes, in this framing, an engineering problem.
But a Laschian perspective asks a more uncomfortable question: are these crises failures of intelligence — or failures of restraint?
If climate collapse results from the refusal to limit growth, then deploying AI systems to sustain and accelerate that same growth evades the moral diagnosis. If biosecurity threats emerge from the hyper-connected, modern bio-industrial machine, then deploying AI to further integrate and scale that same infrastructure may deepen rather than resolve the underlying fragility.
Consider this: A civilization convinced it can technologically outrun limits has little incentive to internalize them.
This does not mean AI is irrelevant to existential risk — far from it. Climate modeling, pandemic surveillance, materials discovery, and energy optimization may all prove indispensable. But their ethical significance depends on whether they reinforce or evade the recognition of limits.
AI can help us live within planetary boundaries — or help us postpone reckoning with them.
Indeed, one of the great ironies is that even some techno-optimists and accelerationists have been driven to reckon with the necessity of limits. When those most ideologically committed to boundless technological progress find themselves debating what AI systems should be allowed to do, how powerful they should become, and who should control them — the Laschian critique has, in a sense, arrived uninvited at their own doorstep. Limit-phobia, it turns out, has its limits.
That the builders of AI are now debating whether it should exist at all — and in what form — marks a significant, if incomplete, moment of self-doubt within the progress tradition.
So can AI solve existential problems?
Only if those problems are primarily computational. Only if ecological collapse, bio-risk, and civilizational fragility stem from insufficient intelligence rather than disordered desire — a desire that AI can increasingly model and predict, but not transform. Only if technique can substitute for discipline.
Lasch would doubt it.
Existential threats, in his framework, are less the result of ignorance than of hubris - a civilization organized around the refusal to accept finitude. Think of Silicon Valley's burgeoning longevity industry, where defeating death has become a legitimate investment thesis rather than a philosophical provocation. To the extent AI becomes another instrument in that refusal, it will magnify rather than resolve the crises we face.
Martine Rothblatt (right), founder of United Therapeutics, who declared at a 2017 longevity symposium that technology could make death "optional."
Image: Fortune.
The deeper question, then, is not whether AI is powerful enough to save us. It is whether we are morally capable of using power in the presence of limits - or whether, faced with every boundary, we will simply build a larger machine.
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