The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don’t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means of endless tyranny, with all hopes of human freedom extinguished.

Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.

But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a cliché, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.
[click to continue…]