1. I re-read the third chapter of Mill’s On Liberty yesterday and was struck by a passage on why we don’t (and shouldn’t) want to delegate decision making , craftsmanship and our agency generally to automata. A foreshadowing of Nozick’s experience machine and also probably echoed in a different by Marx on automation.
2. Your two concerns remind me of James C Scott’s work, especially Seeing Like a State. There are interesting analogies between AI centralization and the emergence of states—both make us more legible, artificially so of course, and we make ourselves more legible to them. In the process we give up on agency, diversity, and local knowledge (métis for Scott).
3. Partly inspired by Scott, C Thi Nguyen’s work on gamification and value capture shares your two concerns as well.
(Again, Mill was right about the need to allow for many different kinds of experiments of living, as a corrective to the sort optimization you and Nguyen are worried about.)
Excellent. Three remarks.
1. I re-read the third chapter of Mill’s On Liberty yesterday and was struck by a passage on why we don’t (and shouldn’t) want to delegate decision making , craftsmanship and our agency generally to automata. A foreshadowing of Nozick’s experience machine and also probably echoed in a different by Marx on automation.
2. Your two concerns remind me of James C Scott’s work, especially Seeing Like a State. There are interesting analogies between AI centralization and the emergence of states—both make us more legible, artificially so of course, and we make ourselves more legible to them. In the process we give up on agency, diversity, and local knowledge (métis for Scott).
3. Partly inspired by Scott, C Thi Nguyen’s work on gamification and value capture shares your two concerns as well.
(Again, Mill was right about the need to allow for many different kinds of experiments of living, as a corrective to the sort optimization you and Nguyen are worried about.)
This is a great piece. I'd love to chat about it with you on my philosophy podcast if you're interested. If so, DM. Either way, good article!