The Cello in the Engine Room: Why the Age of AI Needs a Second Enlightenment

An essay on the end of the self-optimisation economy, the legacy of solidarity left by the bourgeoisie and the labour movement, the return of Spinoza and the Stoics – and the question of what remains of the human being once the machine takes over the work.
(Inspired by a conversation between Richard David Precht and Philipp Blom)

We are currently witnessing a fascinating spectacle of collective denial. In boardrooms, at conferences and in the media, artificial intelligence is discussed almost exclusively as what it appears to be at first glance: the ultimate efficiency machine. A tool that writes texts, generates code, makes diagnoses, speeds up administrative procedures and cuts costs. Yet because the human brain evolved to deal with linear dangers in its immediate field of vision and struggles with exponential developments, we persistently dodge the real question: what actually happens on the day after we have optimised every last process?
In a recent edition of the ZDF programme “Precht”, Richard David Precht and the historian and philosopher Philipp Blom touched on precisely this sore spot under the title “Warum Vernunft aus der Mode kommt” (“Why Reason Is Going Out of Fashion”). As Precht aptly outlines there, the first machine age – when the abilities of the human hand were replaced by machines – marked the beginning of the bourgeois era. Now, however, we are entering a “second machine age”, in which artificial intelligence can replace large swathes of routine and specialist intellectual work. This shakes a foundation more than two hundred years old: the habit of human beings defining their place in society, their social contacts, their self-worth and, above all, their material right to exist through paid employment.
When people today view this development with unease, it is neither mere technophobia nor vain concern about losing status symbols. It is a profoundly rational existential fear. We need money to live and to shape our lives. As long as our economic system pretends that everyone must earn their existence by selling their labour on a market that demands less and less of precisely that labour, “liberation from work” within the existing system simply means social collapse. On top of this comes a deep-seated anthropological fear: human beings are afraid of any change whose destination they do not know. And unlike the post-war period, when – as Blom recalls in the conversation – there was a promise of upward mobility, the belief that one’s own children would one day be better off, Silicon Valley today supplies us with a vision of technological feasibility but no blueprint for society whatsoever.

The Great Desolidarisation – and the Forgotten Legacy of Our Bridge-Builders
But why do we find it so hard today to develop such a vision of solidarity? While Blom already points out in the conversation that a shallow economic liberalism, dominant since the 2000s, has reduced freedom to the right “to optimise oneself for the market”, it is worth taking an even sharper look at the social consequences of this development over the past thirty years.
Elevating self-optimisation to the supreme maxim has produced an insidious moral narrative: if everyone is the architect of their own fortune, then economic success counts as proof of individual superiority – and, conversely, unemployment or poverty as the consequence of personal “laziness”. It is a narrative that stubbornly persists, even though a sober look at the figures shows that genuine full employment has structurally ceased to be attainable in most Western economies for decades. Nevertheless, over these three decades we have learned to kick downwards by reflex: the blame for economic stagnation is sought among the unemployed, the low-paid and the supposed “social hammock”. Meanwhile, any objective debate about the historic widening of income and wealth gaps – as Blom notes, the real incomes of ordinary working people have barely moved since the 1980s, while large fortunes have exploded – is immediately smothered by the knee-jerk conversation-stopper of “envy” or the “envy tax”.
This desolidarisation is flanked by an ever louder libertarianism, which Precht describes using the example of American thought leaders such as Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, but whose harbingers have long since reached our everyday economic life in Europe as well. Although markets, as Blom soberly observes, never exist in a vacuum but function only because there are courts, schools, police, roads and antitrust laws, the democratic tax state is being systematically delegitimised in parts of the economic debate and framed as “robbery” or “theft” of the property of high achievers.
This libertarian narrative suffers from historical amnesia. It completely forgets how the untamed capitalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries was once tamed and made viable in the first place – namely through bridge-building from two sides: by a responsible bourgeoisie just as much as by a determined labour movement.
On the bourgeois and agrarian side, savings banks were once founded not to maximise profits on the financial markets but out of a sense of responsibility for the common good, to give broad sections of society security and a share in economic life. The Raiffeisen banks and cooperatives grew out of Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen’s profound insight: “What is impossible for the individual, many can achieve.” And our insurance companies emerged from mutual associations designed to spread the burden of existential strokes of fate across shared shoulders.
At the same time, against enormous resistance, the labour movement fought for the right to dignity, education, social security and democratic co-determination for those millions of people who possessed nothing but their own labour. Austria in particular turned this into a democratic achievement that remains an international model to this day with the founding of the Chambers of Labour in 1920: here, the labour movement’s ideas of collective self-help, protection under labour and social law, consumer protection and intellectual emancipation through education were cast into a statutory institution that gives employees a scientifically grounded and politically weighty voice on an equal footing with business.
Only this interplay – the combined effect of bourgeois public spirit, cooperative self-help and the institutions won by the labour movement, such as the Chambers of Labour and the social partnership – built the bridge after the Second World War over which our society arrived at historically unprecedented prosperity, social mobility and internal peace. Anyone who preaches division and the law of the strongest again today, in the face of the AI revolution, is taking an axe to both pillars of that bridge.

The Birth Defect of the First Enlightenment
To lay a new foundation for the 21st century, it is worth following Philipp Blom’s exploration of the history of ideas. In his books and in his conversation with Precht, Blom argues that what we today call “the Enlightenment” was essentially an invention of heavily bearded 19th-century historians who wrote a suitable founding legend for the rising bourgeoisie around thinkers such as Kant and Voltaire.
Almost all of these moderate Enlighteners, Blom stresses, had been shaped in Christian – often Jesuit – schools. They may have written against throne and altar, but they retained the theological reflex of thought: the biblical “Fill the earth and subdue it” became the scientific domination of nature; Christian salvation history became the linear belief in progress. And in Kant, the Christian soul was replaced by “reason”, whose task henceforth was to suppress one’s own body, feelings and instincts.
Precht adds a crucial observation to this diagnosis: whereas the ancient Greek concept of logos still united technical rationality with practical wisdom for living, merely technical, purpose-driven rationality split off in the 19th century and took on a life of its own – until today, as both of them diagnose, it culminates in the AI age in the service of utterly irrational goals of power and wealth. The bitter punchline: it is precisely in this split-off, calculating rationality that artificial intelligence has now overtaken us. Anyone who continues to define human beings by the yardstick of the moderate Enlightenment, as cognitive problem-solvers for the market, renders them superfluous in the age of AI.

Spinoza, the Stoics and the Cultivation of Emotion
Yet Blom reminds us that the Enlightenments of the 17th and 18th centuries were in truth far more complex, cheekier and more contradictory. Thinkers of the radical Enlightenment such as Baruch de Spinoza or Denis Diderot refused to subject human beings to a Christian-inflected dualism of mind and body. As Blom emphasises, from the perspective of these thinkers – and of modern science – we are not purely rational beings standing above nature, but bodily, social animals whose deepest goals in life – closeness, community, food, sexuality, having children – are, economically and formally speaking, entirely “irrational”, yet constitute the very essence of our humanity. Taken at its word, this idea of Blom’s and Spinoza’s becomes our lifeline in the age of AI: when the machine takes over our familiar work and the business of optimising, it does not take away our being human – it only takes away the being a machine that we turned ourselves into in the economy of utility.

But how do we, as bodily and emotional beings, cope with the uncertainties of this upheaval? Precht points out in the conversation that the bourgeoisie of earlier generations suppressed the display of feelings, whereas our present has swung to the opposite extreme: under the banner of “authenticity”, every unfiltered feeling is now elevated to a truth of its own – but no commonwealth can be knitted together from a mass of atomised ego-worlds.
To close this gap between cold rationalism and unbridled emotionalisation, it makes sense to return to a philosophical tradition that had already deeply shaped Spinoza: ancient Stoicism. To live stoically in the original sense of Seneca, Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius means precisely not to deny one’s feelings. The Stoics knew that we cannot escape the first onrush of emotions – including the fear of change. The real art lies in cultivating emotion: accepting it without blindly following it, distinguishing between what is not in our power and what we can actively shape, and thereby turning paralysing fear into a sovereign capacity to act.

The Cello Principle: Why Freedom Takes Practice
But what do we shape when traditional paid work fades as the central substance of our lives? Towards the end of his conversation with Precht, Philipp Blom offers an unforgettable image from his own experience as a musician to answer this question: if you put the world’s most expensive Stradivarius cello into someone’s hands and tell them they are now completely free to play whatever they like on it, that freedom is utterly useless to them – unless they have practised for twenty years. Only those who voluntarily accept constraints and discipline, who practise even when they don’t feel like it, conquer for themselves the space of action in which true freedom becomes possible at all. Freedom, says Blom, is not the childish “I do what I want”, but a space that cannot be bought, only earned through time and effort.
This, as Blom and Precht work out together, is exactly where the greatest cultural danger of the AI age lies. Artificial intelligence seduces us with the promise of relieving us of every tiresome effort: You have a question? I already have the answer. You no longer need to learn how to ask questions, how to do your own research or how to think in complex ways. If we give in to this temptation, Blom warns, “we might as well put ourselves in mothballs”. And Precht adds how difficult it will be in the AI age to make people understand that they must nevertheless walk these “long paths on which they mature” in order to acquire an inner wealth that can no longer be exploited economically at all.
If we apply this “cello principle” to our world of work and life, it becomes clear that true liberation from paid employment does not mean the end of effort, but the liberation of effort from the dictates of the market. We need the long paths of practice and maturing – in music, in art, in craftsmanship, in sport, in voluntary work, and above all wherever we, as Blom urges, do not merely remain “a finger that swipes and an eye that looks”, but meet one another as bodily beings in analogue space: in the theatre, in the concert hall, in the coffee house, in direct conversation from person to person.

The Task for Tomorrow
The human tendency towards denial will probably mean that we only seriously engage in the great debate about decoupling work and income once the pressure on the labour market becomes impossible to ignore. But we must cut the intellectual paths for it today – not through new trench warfare, but as bridge-builders.
A “second Enlightenment” for the 21st century must combine what Blom and Precht have set in motion philosophically with a tangible renewal of our economic and social order: it must build on the finest legacy of solidarity in our history – on the founding spirit of the savings banks, cooperatives and insurance associations just as much as on the achievements of the labour movement and the Chambers of Labour. It must debunk the libertarian myth of the tax-free self-optimiser and ensure that the enormous productivity gains of AI finance the commonwealth through a legitimate tax system and free people from naked existential fear. And it must remind us culturally that our worth does not lie in being better computers. Only when we secure material existence fairly and at the same time summon the courage to cultivate our emotions stoically and pick up our own “cello” will the crisis of the work-based society turn into a renaissance of the human.