Summary of Research Paper

The digital age presents opportunities, challenges, and questions. One of the key questions to ask is how it affects our identities—and what do we even mean by “identity”?

The paper argues that “identity” as a term only emerged into mainstream cultural usage in the past seventy years. Its antecedent was the “self”, and before that a term that is now largely defunct in mainstream public conversation: the soul.

All these are intimately bound up with our information technologies: in the first case, with literacy itself. The concept of the soul emerged alongside literacy; the “self” in parallel with the printing press; and our contemporary understanding of “identity” emerged in tandem with the digital era. This has led to a radical transformation in our understanding of what a person is, how we relate to technologies, and the rise of “identity politics”.

The digital revolution has already reshaped politics, culture, sex, family, and even consciousness itself. Now, we stand at the threshold of rapid advances in “artificial intelligence”, creating machines that interact with us with apparently human functions and appear to replicate and outclass human capabilities. For AI optimists, this represents a transformative accelerant of human life, while pessimists warn of the grave dangers super-intelligent machines pose to our lives. But beneath these debates lies a profound question: will human thought and computation ever amount to the same thing?

Harrington argues that we can make inferences from interlinked developments in the digital revolution, and in our concepts of “identity”, concerning whether this dream of artificial “thought” will ever be realised. Drawing on Plato’s ancient concept of the tripartite soul, comprising eros (appetite), thumos (the desire for recognition), and logos (comprehension) she argues that the digital revolution has turned technology inward upon the soul itself, first industrialising eros via the sexual revolution, then thumos, via social media. Now, the target is logos, via AI. Soul Trader shows that while these developments have had widespread impact they have nonetheless not delivered on the original promise of enabling us to master and perfect our own selves through technology. Nor will our attempts to transcend ourselves via AI.

The costs of this mistaken trajectory could be grave. But averting this outcome does not require us to abandon digital technology. Rather, we must be willing to retrieve the concept of 'soul' and grasp that it is distinct from machine 'thinking'. Provided we manage this, we need neither fear nor reject the digital era out of hand. Instead, we may yet be able to reorient ourselves, and our technologies, toward genuine progress and human flourishing.