Heidegger Waiting on an AI Threshold Event: Beyond the Empirical Turn in Philosophy of Technology

As Philosophy of Technology is increasingly mobilized to address artificial intelligence, much scholarship—whether utopian, catastrophist, or explicitly anti-singularitarian—remains structured by the ontology and temporality of a future AI threshold event. This paper argues that such futural orientations sustain a potentially hazardous form of “awaiting”: ethical reflection becomes predictive and solutionist, oriented to determinate risks presumed to materialize as future empirical dangers and threats. Against this backdrop, I diagnose a tendency within the “empirical turn” and post-phenomenological AI ethics toward what I call “ontic solutionism”: an approach bracketing ontology, narrowing attention to artifacts and measurable future harms, and thereby obscuring dangers that remain indeterminate in the present.

Re-reading Heidegger—despite his exclusion from much post-phenomenological self-definition—I show that neglect of his concept of indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) underwrites familiar charges of techno-pessimism and determinism, and blocks key “reversals” (Umkehrungen) needed to grasp AI’s deeper threat: technologically induced nihilism. Developing Heidegger’s crucial distinctions between “awaiting” (erwarten) and “waiting” (warten), and between “advent” (Ankunft) and “event” (Ereignis), I propose a non-predictive orientation to AI as event in the present: a disciplined, non-willing readiness attuned to indeterminacy, which avoids pessimistic resignation in the face of techno-determinism. This stance does not abandon ontic interventions, but re-grounds AI ethics ontologically, clarifying how successful empirical safeguards may intensify the very technological disclosure they seek to manage.