1855: Søren Kierkegaard dies in Copenhagen

On 11 November 1855, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard died at the age of 42 in Copenhagen. Though he never saw a computer and lived a century before the term "artificial intelligence" was coined, his radical exploration of subjectivity, existence, and what it means to be a self has quietly shaped the philosophical undercurrents of modern AI debates.

Kierkegaard rejected the grand systematic philosophies of his day, insisting that truth is subjectivity. For him, the human being is not a thinking machine that can be reduced to logic or calculation, but a passionate, anxious individual confronted with choices, despair, and the need for a "leap" into authentic existence. His pseudonymous works—such as "Either/Or", "Fear and Trembling", and "The Sickness unto Death"—probe the inner life with a psychological acuity that prefigures later cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

How did these ideas travel into AI? In the twentieth century, existentialist thought influenced phenomenologists and philosophers who questioned whether computation could ever capture consciousness or intentionality. Thinkers engaging with Heidegger (himself deeply marked by Kierkegaard) and later with Hubert Dreyfus argued that human expertise and understanding are grounded in embodied, situated existence rather than formal rules—critiques that challenged early symbolic AI and helped open the door to alternative approaches such as connectionism and situated robotics. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the irreducibly first-person perspective continues to haunt discussions of machine consciousness: can an AI system ever have a "self," experience anxiety, or make an authentic choice?

Today, as large language models generate fluent text and robots navigate the world, Kierkegaard’s questions feel newly urgent. When we ask whether an AI "understands" or merely simulates understanding, or whether advanced systems could possess something like care or despair, we are still wrestling with the problem of subjectivity he posed so sharply. His insistence that the existing individual cannot be absorbed into any system remains a provocative counterpoint to dreams of total computational models of mind—reminding us that the history of AI is also a history of philosophical unsettlement about what makes us human.