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Reoccupied eschatologies: AI futurism, Umbesetzung, and the limits of modernity’s self-assertion
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DOI：10.1007/s00146-026-03300-6.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Existing scholarship in religion and technology has noted that the discourse of AI futurism, and especially the cluster of ideas constituting the Technological Singularity, exhibits striking structural resemblance to Christian eschatology. From Geraci’s “Apocalyptic AI” to Tirosh-Samuelson’s account of transhumanism as a “secularist faith”, the resemblance has been extensively catalogued. This article argues that resemblance, though real, is descriptively insufficient: by itself it cannot distinguish deep historical inheritance from accidental likeness, and it leaves defenders of the discourse free to concede surface similarity while denying its significance. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of Umbesetzung (reoccupation), the refilling of structurally vacated answer-positions whose underlying questions persist and situating it within the Löwith–Blumenberg debate on secularisation, we recast the relation as functional and structural rather than merely analogical. We advance three claims. First, AI futurism reoccupies, in Blumenberg’s sense, the answer-positions vacated by Christian eschatology: analogy is the symptom and reoccupation the mechanism that explains it. Second, this reoccupation involves the reformulation of the underlying questions and not merely the substitution of new answers; the philosophically distinctive feature of Blumenberg’s account. Third, and centrally, we argue that reoccupation itself admits of degrees of autonomous self-assertion, and that Blumenberg’s defence of modernity holds—by his own admission—only “in all but a few recognizable and specific instances.” Measured by how thickly it reformulates its inherited questions and how autonomously it generates its own content, AI futurism, once its genuinely technical problems are totalised into a drama of ultimate destiny, does so little autonomous work that it approaches the boundary at which, on Blumenberg’s own terms, the secularisation description recovers its purchase. It is in this sense a limit case: not a refutation of Blumenberg, but a candidate for the class of exceptions his thesis concedes, one that returns qualified, local force to Löwith’s secularisation thesis for this discursive formation without overturning Blumenberg’s general defence of modernity’s legitimacy. Throughout, we distinguish AI futurism as a cultural–eschatological imaginary from AI safety as a heterogeneous technical field. The paper situates its arguments alongside Coeckelbergh’s recent revision of Blumenberg’s myth-anthropology and clarifies how reoccupation-analysis operates at a different and complementary level of abstraction from myth-analysis.
Keywords:
Artificial intelligence
Blumenberg
Umbesetzung
AI futurism
Eschatology
Myth
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