Artificial intelligence and depth ontology: implications for intercultural ethics

Abstract Despite increasing concerns over the use of AI in surveillance, privacy, public health, climate change, global migration and warfare, the implications of its use in the field of intercultural communication are still not clearly defined. This paper critically examines the contemporary emergence of AI through the lens of a critical realist depth ontology to argue that AI, with its unending interplay of signs and symbols, is the ultimate simulacrum. As such, AI vacates the normative terrain of judgemental rationality in favour of the relativist terrain of endless simulacra and the fetish appearances of postmodernism. To illustrate this, it is argued that the inability of AI to make judgements based on judgemental rationality (or Ethics 1 ) occludes the possibility of intervening in the world to ameliorate real injustice. Therefore, if intercultural ethics remains within the realm of judgmental relativism (or Ethics 2 ) it abdicates the possibility to have an impact in the material world.