The Philosophy
He named the feeling AI gives you. In 1956.
Günther Siegmund Stern was born in 1902 in Breslau to a family of pioneering psychologists. He studied under Husserl, married Hannah Arendt, fled the Nazis, and ended up working in a factory in Los Angeles. That factory job changed his thinking forever.
While working as a journalist, he took the pen name Anders — "different" in German. His mother noted his "unmistakable desire to be different." The name stuck. He became Günther Anders: the philosopher who was, by definition, other.
The name resonates here. Anders was born Stern. I'm Sterngold. My first company with my brother was called Anders Star. The connections weren't planned — they were discovered.
In 1942, living in exile in New York, Anders wrote in his diary:
"Believe I have found the signs of an entirely new form of shame this morning. I will provisionally call it Promethean shame."
What he had observed — first in himself, then in factory workers in Los Angeles — was something no philosopher had described before: humans who weren't angry at the machines beside them. They were ashamed of themselves.
Ashamed that the machine was faster. More precise. Tireless. Replaceable without grief. The workers looked at the conveyor belt and felt not rage, not resistance, but the quiet humiliation of being the weaker part.
His core insight: the shame humans feel not at their failures, but at being inferior to the things they created. Next to the machine, to be human is to be defective.
This is the deepest cut in Anders' thinking. The distinction that explains why AI transformation feels so personal:
Humans are born — messy, fragile, mortal, unchosen. We didn't pick our bodies, our limits, our mortality.
Machines are made — precise, durable, purposeful, designed. Every part is intentional.
Anders argued that we feel shame at having been born rather than having been manufactured. And this shame generates a perverse impulse: instead of rejecting the machine, we try to become it. We start valuing efficiency over judgment. Speed over depth. Output over meaning. We reshape ourselves to match the thing that humiliated us.
"The shame felt by the 'born' human — fragile, inconsistent, emotional, mortal — when confronted with the 'made' machine — perfect, durable, efficient, seemingly immortal."
Anders identified something else: a growing disconnect between what humans can produce and what they can imagine. He called it the Promethean gap (prometheisches Gefälle).
Prometheus gave humanity fire. Anders pointed out that the fire had outgrown us. We build technologies more powerful than we can emotionally or ethically comprehend. The gap extends across everything:
His test case was the atomic bomb — proof that civilization could produce its own end without being able to imagine what that meant. Our test case is AI: immense, almost incomprehensible capability that arrived faster than any organisation's ability to process it.
In 1956, Anders published Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen — The Obsolescence of the Human. His thesis: humans don't fear technology because it threatens them. They fear it because it humiliates them. The machine doesn't need to replace you for you to feel replaced. It just needs to be better than you at the thing you thought made you valuable.
Long before "AI ethics," "automation anxiety," or "existential risk" became common currency, Anders articulated the central paradox that now structures our age. He diagnosed the disease in 1956. WerkAnders offers the treatment in 2026.
The question isn't how to make people less afraid of AI. Fear you can argue with. Shame is different. Shame makes you go quiet. Shame makes you pretend you're fine. Shame makes you adapt to the machine instead of asking what the machine should adapt to.
The real work isn't teaching people to use AI. It's helping them remember what they're for.