the worlds we can lose when intelligence becomes artificial

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Peter

In 1958, Hannah Arendt could see where were were headed:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. …

It would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company tor good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is. (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958, p. 3)

What is “human existence as it has been given”?

For most of our history, most human beings have lived with other people whose names they know. They have worked individually and collaboratively with materials in their context to make an environment that I will call a “world.”

A world has these features:

It is imbued with moral significance, because other people have made it, given it meaning, cared about it, and been affected by it. An individual cannot interact with a world without causing good or harm to other people.
It is real, not imaginary, and therefore it is stubborn. It rarely turns out the way we want, but we can learn from experience to work more effectively with it.
The other people involved in any world hold partially conflicting interests and goals and can be stubborn in their own way. Both the materials and the people resist any single will.
Each person has partial and even biased knowledge, beliefs, and feelings about the world. But their varied ideas can accumulate as they express them and record them. Each person can therefore explore not only a world but the accumulated human experience of that world.
Because we must act in the company of other people and learn by acting, our “thinking and speaking” are closely connected.
Because our deepest concerns (moral, spiritual, and otherwise) relate to the world that we shape with our minds and hands, our “thought” is also connected to our “know-how.”
Each world typically predates each human being and survives the person’s death, yet each person can affect it. In fact, the birth of any human being automatically changes the world, if for no other reason than a birth turns people into parents, siblings, and other kinds of relatives.
There is not one world but many human worlds. But worlds can interact to various degrees without becoming subsumed into one bigger world.

Why it is good to live in a world

It is not obvious that living in this kind of world is the best imaginable form of life. Most people have envisioned heaven or a political utopia differently. (For instance, in an ideal world, the other people usually become less stubborn!) But I could make three arguments in favor of living in a world like this.

First, it seems plausible that homo sapiens evolved for such a life. Our brains, senses, and bodies are equipped to navigate it.

For instance, newborn infants already recognize faces, which are designed to communicate information and emotions. And our languages and cultures have accumulated deep resources for sharing a world with finite other human beings. The Proto-Indo-European language already used first-, second-, and third-person verbs and indicative, imperative, and subjunctive moods to make distinctions that are useful for group discussions about a common world. Thus a world is arguably our habitat.

Second, the combination of agency and humility seems morally compelling. It is fitting that we can affect our environment but not do just anything we individually want with it. And we should see our context as imbued with moral significance.

Third, navigating a world is a way for creatures like us to achieve comprehension, to make sense of matters. As Arendt writes:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the
singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves (1958, p. 4).

Threats to human worlds

Each human world has always been fragile, subject to destruction if invaders arrive, a plague strikes, or the community breaks down.

In addition, tyrants threaten any shared world because they can turn individuals into means to their solo ends.

Mass society puts each world at risk by bringing us into relationships with millions of others, whose names we will never learn. And mass economic exploitation makes matters worse. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says, “loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, … is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. [It is] is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.”

When history seems to move quickly and beyond anyone’s control, humans cease to feel that they are agents in any recognizable world.

Ideology can be defined as any system of thought that substitutes core assumptions for actual engagement with other people in a common world.

Finally, although media can enrich any given world, it can also disrupt it. Imagine people sitting alone or in passive company before a TV screen that tells them about gruesome crimes. Their actual world may be safe, or less dangerous than it was in the past, but the mediated world is cruel.

New threats in the age of AI

This theoretical framework comes from Arendt, who drew on Heidegger’s fundamental insight that the human form of being (Dasein) is always “‘in’ the world in the sense that it deals with entities encountered within-the-world, and does so concernfully and with familiarity” (Being and Time, H105, trans. by Macquarrie & Robinson). Arendt makes Heidegger’s theory political and republican by emphasizing that people can talk and decide what to do with their worlds.

I have sketched this view to help make sense of a new phenomenon: intelligence that is artificial (AI). But Arendt already feared that we might “need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.”

When a person expresses a view, the content of what they say helps us to understand the world that the person inhabits. Even when people are flat-out wrong, the fact that they err or lie is part of our reality. In addition, a human view comes from a creature that can suffer. As such, it makes a claim on our compassion. In short, we attend not only to the content of the statement but also to the person who expressed it.

In contrast, when a large language model (LLM) answers a query (typically in the first-person singular and with emotive language like “I will be glad to …”), it does not reflect any particular perspective, nor does it come from a body that is capable of suffering. It just pretends to be a fellow participant in our world. We can attend to the words but not to the speaker.

Walter Cronkite was not really a visitor to Americans’ living rooms in 1970. He just appeared on TV screens. But he was a real person who could be assessed as such. An LLM is qualitatively different.

An LLM can be just another tool or resource, like a Heidegger’s hammer or perhaps like a library. I have collaborated with teams of Tufts engineering students to build the Civic Helpdesk and other applications of AI that are not yet publicly available. Working with them to fine-tune instructions or to design a user interface feels very much like collaborative work in a shared world. Note that I naturally said we “built” these tools, because the work feels roughly like building a shed, or perhaps an organization.

I have also developed what I think is a fairly tight practice of asking Claude about the Sanskrit and Pali original words in texts that I can only read in translation. This feels like a modest expansion of my inner life, if not a contribution to any shared world. (By the way, Claude is probably pulling these definitions from a finite set of published lexicons that have human authors.)

On the other hand, as Pope Leo notes in Magnifica humanitas, “current AI systems are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’ for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows.’ As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.” This sounds more like Arendt’s nightmare of a time when our thoughts cannot grasp what we have done.

The deepest concern is that we have developed biologically and culturally to flourish in what Arendt would call a world, but an individual who uses AI is no longer there.

the papal encyclical on AI

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Peter

Magnifica humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is Pope Leo ~~XIX’s~~ XIV’s first encylical, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”

Near the beginning, Leo makes a plea for “a shared discernment process.” He warns against worrying only about “contingencies” and “a succession of emergencies.” It is urgent to think ahout AI more deeply.

He observes that “most people are watching and waiting, observing from afar and merely hoping for the best. For this very reason, crucial questions impose themselves on our conscience and can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?”

When the Catholic Church practices “discernment” about social conditions, it “does not claim to offer ‘a definitive opinion'” but strives “to listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times and to interpret them in the light of God’s word.” Leo says that the Church is open not only to technical expertise but also to “a diversity of opinions” about values. Leo mentions previous papal letters with gratitude but also “gratefully acknowledges” the development of human rights doctrine through documents like the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which did not originate with the Church.

Coming from outside the Church, I also welcome a basic inquiry into human intelligence at a time when computers are supporting a different kind of intelligence that poses risks for humans. The “central question” of the encyclical is indeed a basic question of our day: “what does it mean to safeguard our humanity?” I welcome the normative contributions of Catholic social doctrine, in much the way that Leo says he welcomes other views.

In paragraphs 11-14, Leo names four principles that are essential for “building a city founded on the common good.” The first is “a firm relationship with God.” I respect that idea but cannot follow it. But the second one is important and can be developed outside of Christianity. Leo says:

Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited ‘upgrades,’ in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds. As a result, while some pursue the illusion of unlimited self-assertion, many are deprived of basic necessities. The Church reminds us, with a firm yet humble voice, that true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth. It is found where freedom and responsibility are intertwined with mutual care and true solidarity, and where progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples.

This is very much like Hannah Arendt’s understanding of love for the world (amor mundi). We must love the species we happen to be (including the male portion, by the way). Our love for people should not be contingent on believing that we are good or smart.

When we can improve the human condition, we should. For example, if we can use gene therapy to cure a debilitating disease, then it is our obligation to do so. But the goal is never to perfect human beings. It is to help humans do the best we can with what we are, together.

Leo’s reference to a “city” based on love involves two Biblical stories that he briefly sketches near the outset. The Tower of Babel resembles a modern Large Language Model (LLM):

Fearing being scattered across the earth, [the people] sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to ‘make a name’ for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion.

The other city is Jerusalem as it was rebuilt by Nehemiah–a story with deep civic resonance that I have discussed on this blog and in What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (pp. 81-83)

The teachings of the Church are grounded in biblical narratives like these but have developed through previous efforts of discernment in modern times. Leo discerns the following components of today’s Catholic Social Doctrine: the equal dignity of all human beings; the supreme value of human rights; the principle of the common good; the principle of the universal destination of goods; the principle of subsidiarity; the principle of solidarity and the principle of social justice.

I will mention a few points that interested me from this framework.

First, the encyclical develops an interesting view of property rights in an era of data science and AI. Leo acknowledges that “certainly there is a right to private property, which has its own specific meaning and purpose.” (He does not explain the purpose of private property, but it could be to permit individuality and thus human dignity.) However, for Leo, private property is “always subordinate to the universal destination of goods,” which means that “the earth’s goods — soil, water, air and natural resources — are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all, and … every person has an inherent right to the use of such goods, both now and in the future.”

So far, this is established Catholic Social Doctrine, but the novel point in Magnifica humanitas involves intellectual property: “Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.” Later, Leo says, “Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good.”

Prevalent legal frameworks treat software and intellectual property as the work of human beings who have the right to own the fruits of their work. But Leo traces all goods back to God. When a human being invents software or a machine, there is no second creation. The output is still meant for the entire human family.

Leo also makes a strong argument against tech-bro economics:

It is important to ensure that this growth in appreciation of human dignity is not obscured by the pressure of new ideologies or very powerful interests in today’s world. Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.

The practical concerns that the encyclical catalogues include propaganda and misinformation, loss of meaningful work, rising inequalities of power and wealth, and deadly militarism enabled by “autonomous” weapons systems.

These are valid topics, and the encyclical sometimes reads like a thoughtful but relatively conventional policy white paper.

At times, however, the specifically Catholic perspective lends additional depth to its conventional recommendations. For instance, here is some general advice regarding education in a time of AI:

We need adults to rediscover their vocation as artisans of education, prepared to work patiently each day, with the support of extensive and shared educational partnerships. Today, accompanying children and young people in using technology for developing responsible relationships, helping them to recognize the risks and choose what fosters inner freedom, is a concrete form of charity and will safeguard their dignity. Teaching new generations that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility, constitutes one of the most valuable services to the common good.

A purely secular nonprofit could have written those sentences, although perhaps without the reference to charity (caritas). But only the Church would preface this passage with the preceding sentence: “Indeed, we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized, one that requires generous missionaries who are mature in the faith.”

I suppose I would have liked to read a bit more about the spiritual costs of intelligence that is artificial rather than an activity of the human mind. In the history of the Catholic Church, technology has repeatedly changed how human beings have formed and communicated ideas and meanings. The codex, the confessional, the cathedral, the printing press, and the broadcast studio have restructured individual and collective mentalities. We have survived such changes so far, as has the Church. But right now, we must think deeply and act effectively to prevent AI from reducing us to “data, a cog in a machine or a commodity” so that it can instead become an “instrument of growth, justice and fraternity.”

attitudes about AI by age

Posted on May 22, 2026 by Peter

In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg writes that college students are jeering at tech oligarchs who give commencement speeches about the benefits of AI. A Wall Street Journal article begins, “The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it—as former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt saw on Friday” when he was booed at University of Arizona.

I had been wondering about this topic. The students I know best tend to be highly critical of AI, but presumably their generation holds varied opinions.

The Quinnipiac Poll asked Americans their attitudes about AI, and here I show those broken down by age.

Older people are the most likely to say that they are not excited at all by AI. Millennials (now at least 30 years old) are the most likely to say they are very excited, although that it is true for only 12% of them. Among Gen Z (under 30), the most common response is “not so excited,” and only 4 percent of them are very excited.

When asked whether AI will do more good or harm to people’s own day-to-day life, most Americans say “more harm,” and that is true of 55% of Gen-Z. The youngest generation is the most likely to say that AI will harm education (68% think it will harm education and 29% that it will help).

Just over 40% of each generation is somewhat concerned about AI overall, with no age differences. A bit more than half of Gen Z are very concerned, but rates of concern are higher among Millennials, who are quite polarized on the topic.

Without access to the raw data, I can’t see how age, education, gender, ideology, race, and personal experience with AI relate to opinions about AI. However, respondents who have more education and income are generally more favorable to AI in this poll. Those patterns hint that current college students may be more sanguine about AI than their contemporaries who are not going to college.

people as clusters of attention

Posted on May 18, 2026 by Peter

Attention is endangered. It is what Silicon Valley has learned to capture and commoditize. It is what LLMs pretend to offer by speaking in the first-person singular, often in a sycophantic voice. It is what my iPhone takes from me. It is what Donald Trump constantly demands.

To understand why our attention should be valuable to us, we need a satisfactory theory of it. We should not depend on the idea that we have a private, inner self that creates or determines its own attention and owns it like a plot of property. Yet our attention does not belong to Google and Meta or to Donald Trump, and we are worse off when they determine it. Here is an effort at an explanation.

1. The belief in a willing self

It feels as if we decide to do certain things. The reason they occur is that we will them. Other things happen to us, or just happen. For instance, I stand up because I decide to do so, but I fall down because someone pushes me or the leg of my chair breaks.

What am I? I am the thing that wills my own actions.

Sometimes we hear that this theory is “Western” or “modern,” but classical Indian Buddhist thinkers–who disagreed with the theory–nevertheless argued that all sentient beings believe it until they achieve enlightenment. The intended reader of a classical Buddhist text was neither Western nor modern yet believed in a self that willed its own actions. Classical Buddhist authors defined themselves as opponents of other Asian authors who explicitly endorsed this theory, including foundational Hindu texts.

I presume that most or all people believe in a willing self because it makes sense of experience. We are so constituted that we feel that we decide and choose some things, while other things happen to us.

This theory also supports significant and appropriate moral distinctions. We hold ourselves and other people accountable for choices, not for accidents. And just as we value and care for our self–which we credit with making choices–so we value and care for other selves.

When we begin by believing in our own willing selves, we naturally pose questions about other wills. Presumably, other human beings are just like us; to assume otherwise is solipsistic and maybe even psychopathic. But from there, the answers become trickier. Do other animals have selves, and if so, which animals? (My dog seems to, but it’s hard to believe that a bacterium does.) Can a group of human beings or a human institution have a will? How about a computer?

2. Drawbacks of the theory

The theory of a willing self has advantages but also limitations that many people recognize, in principle, even as our experiences keep convincing us that it is true.

For one thing, we have no direct knowledge of the self. It can seem like a magical exception in a universe otherwise determined by the causes that are known to science.

The theory of a self implies a sharp distinction between choices and accidents, even though many–possibly all–intentional behavior seems to be a mix of both. I assume that I have freely decided to stand up, but that behavior resulted from a series of neurological events that were affected, in part, by other people and objects.

Although the theory suggests a binary, the world seems to be shaded in grey. My dog Luca has a similar psychology to mine but not completely the same; a lizard is like Luca but also different from him; and an ant is further along the same continuum. A crowd of humans can have a kind of will, but not exactly like mine. A Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits will-like behavior but isn’t a person.

Finally, the notion of a freely choosing self violates important moral intuitions. It is incompatible with Moral Luck, the idea that we can be better or worse as a result of things that happen without our choosing them. For example, I didn’t choose to be an American citizen led by President Trump, but I am. It is wrong to distance myself from that fact on the ground that I didn’t will it. The theory can also encourage us to care too much about our own selves and to regard our freedom and survival as paramount while making us too judgmental about other people. In Buddhism, an enlightened person has shed the belief in itself.

But it is also problematic to deny the existence of selves in such a way that it no longer seems to matter whether we and other people have agency–or even whether we or they survive. A person is a thing of inestimable value even it’s not quite right to understand it as a self that has a will. And a dog is a being of great value even if it’s not on a par with a human person. Somehow, it must make sense to complain when a person’s private space has been violated.

3. Attention, not self

Here is an alternative. I am inspired by Jonardon Ganeri’s book Attention, Not Self (Oxford 2017), which is primarily an interpretation of Buddhaghosa’s The Path of Purification (written around 450 CE) and other works by this classical Theravada thinker, who (in turn) claimed to be faithfully interpreting the words of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims that his whole Path of Purification, which is 853 pages long in the English translation by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, is a commentary on the second stanza of Linked Discourses 1.23 (which I have loosely translated here.)

It would be a thorny matter to decide whether I am interpreting Ganeri reasonably well, whether he offers an accurate reading of Buddhaghosa, whether Buddhaghosa is a reliable interpreter of the Pali Canon, and whether the Canon reflects the ideas of the actual Buddha. Instead, I will simply sketch a view that I’ve formed while reading Ganeri.

We can begin with attention. Although this word does not have a self-evident meaning, we use it successfully. Even a toddler can understand the phrase “Pay attention!” When I say my dog’s name, he attends to me, and when he barks, he wants to get my attention. In other words, Luca and I can play language-games involving attention even if he couldn’t learn the word. In this sense, “attention” is much more tractable than “consciousness.”

In its most general sense, attention is some kind of ordering of experience by an organism. An ant can attend to a leaf.

Ganeri argues that our attention has two general aspects: it functions like a window or aperture that removes most of what we could notice so that we are less distracted; and it directs or faces us toward certain phenomena within the window so that we can more deeply understand those things. When I stare at a tree, I am ignoring other objects in my peripheral vision and I am thinking about the tree. “I have reconstructed Pali Buddhist theory as consisting in the claim that the role of attention in experience consists in an exclusion-guided placing together with a directing towards, where there is no incompatibility between them” (Ganeri 117).

This is a general account of attention, at least for human beings. Ganeri further argues that “attention is disunified;” it comes in many forms.

Among the varieties of attention are focal and placed attention, retained attention, reflective attention, attention through language to the world beyond one’s horizons, attention to one’s own mind, attention to the minds of others through their poise and posture, and attention to one’s life in total. These varieties of attention are, as we will see, put to work to explain perception, memory, mindfulness, testimony, introspection, and empathy (Generi, 221).

Each person’s attention is differentiated from others’. For example, only I can remember my own past experiences, which is a particular way of attending. You can learn about my past and possibly even know facts about my past that I don’t know, but I alone can attend to my past as a memory. Likewise, only I can focus on my future as my own, which I do when I plan. I can attend to you in the way that we call empathy, which you cannot offer to yourself.

If you and I are sitting in a lecture, I may be paying attention while your mind is wondering (or vice-versa, of course). If there is a sudden loud noise, such as a thunderclap, both of us may have our attentions captured or “grabbed,” but this may feel different to each of us because I experienced an interrupted lecture while you experienced an interrupted daydream. Compare William James:

for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, vol. 1, Chapter 9, p. 103.)

There is such a thing as voluntary or intended attention. We can tell by the fact that such attention requires effort. Maybe I am forcing myself to pay attention to the lecture while you are allowing yourself be distracted by someone else in the room, by a feeling of hunger, or by a memory.

James argues that “the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds” yet there is a clear difference between trying to attend to something and doing so because we failed to try or because something else compelled our attention. The difference matters morally:

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not have reined them in…. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law (James, vol; 2, chap 35, p. 497).

Ganeri posits that “Attention is the active organization of experience and action into centred arenas, and Buddhist anatta [the doctrine of no-self] is the claim that there is no room for something real at the centre doing or observing the ordering” (p. 26).

4. Consequences and applications

This theory has the advantage of explaining why each person’s attention is different from others’ without positing a self behind the curtain. It allows us to care whether a given person, including me or you, remains alive and free. A person is a unique cluster or concentration of attention that can attend to its past and future in a unique way. The world will be less when it is gone.

Yet there is also a continuum of qualities and degrees of attention, so that I am very similar to Luca and yet not completely like him. My attention while I write this post is not the same as your attention while you read it, but they connect to each other via the text and our shared experiences. When I am gone, some of what I attended to will be forgotten and some will still receive attention.

Most examples of attention have many causes, some of which can be located mostly inside the organism and others beyond it. There are no sharp boundaries between self and other or between freedom and necessity, but there is a difference between an intense, effortful, deliberated, and concentrated experience of attention versus a complete accident, such as a thunderclap that interrupts a lecture. There is also a difference between reading a novel or listening to a friend and being directed by an algorithm.

Moral responsibility waxes to the degree that we do–or could–expend effort on our own attention. Thus we can be blamed for focusing on bad things or for failing to attend to our responsibilities.

I think we can blame a dog for failing to attend, although much less censoriously than we would blame an adult human being; and we can blame an institution, like the Supreme Court, although we should excuse a dissenting minority.

Ganeri’s theory (to the extent that I have captured it here) is perennial, developed in dialogue with authors who lived in Asia more than 1,500 years ago. It is a theory about human beings, or perhaps about all sentient creatures. But it also feels timely and urgent because human attention is so badly threatened now.

I am currently on vacation in Penzance, Cornwall. I asked Google Gemini’s LLM whether it could summarize a long text for me, and it replied:

I would love to! Please go ahead and upload or paste the text.

Since I’m in Penzance, I’m ready to dive right into your document and pull out the key points, actionable items, or core arguments so you can get the information you need at a glance.

What would you like me to focus on?

Gemini is here in Penzance? That is just creepy. Nevertheless, I uploaded the poem from the Pali Canon that had absorbed Buddaghosa for 853 pages. Gemini “focused on it” and cheerfully gave me a summary in four bullet points. All that was lost was any possible advantage of my attending to that text.

You might think the same of this blog post. if you have read this far, you have devoted some time to my essay, whereas you could instead have read a bit of Ganeri’s book, or the 5th-century Buddhist classic that he interprets, or the original Pali Canon. The fact that I attended to my writing whereas Gemini automatically generated its summary does not make my text better for you.

Indeed, it would be better to read a classic than my blog, but it is also true that we have limited attention and cannot contemplate everything. Summaries are not intrinsically bad, so long as they allow us to focus seriously on other things. Even Gemini’s four-point summary of a poem attributed to the Buddha could enrich a person’s attention if that person then turned to other works.

If we are clusters or concentrations of attention, then each of us has the opportunity to improve their own cluster. What makes attention better is a matter for discussion, but I would nominate complexity, depth, distinctiveness, and service to other people as criteria that we can strive for. A technical tool, such as an LLM or an iPhone, can help, but it can surely erode each of those values if we are not vigilant about it.

See also: The Tangle (a translation of 1.23); AI as Satanic; what should we pay attention to?

AI as Satanic

Posted on March 6, 2026 by Peter

“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou?

Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” (Job 1:6)

Iain McGilchrist quoted this verse in a keynote that I just heard him deliver at a conference at Duke. McGilchrist ranged from neuroscience to theology in a long and rich talk. His premises were scientific, metaphysical, moral, and political, and I wouldn’t endorse them all. But his description of artificial intelligence as satanic is worth serious consideration on its own.

For me (although perhaps not for McGilchrist), Satan is a metaphor. But we need metaphors or models to make sense of phenomena like AI, and Satan provides a valuable alternative to some other metaphors, such as AI as a tool, a machine, a mind, a person, or a social organization.

The Satanic metaphor draws our attention to temptation, which is Satan’s favorite trick. It presents AI as not new but instead as an appearance of things that have been walking to and fro all along, such as greed and power-lust. It explains why AI might seem like a god to some (for instance, Silicon Valley tech-bros), since Satan is known to appear as a false savior. Large language models also speak to us as if they were people, talking sycophantically in the first-person singular, much as Satan does. (“Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?”) Finally, the metaphor poses the classic question of whether AI is an active force or rather a manifestation of human freedom.

AI as the road to socialism?

Posted on February 19, 2026 by Peter

Just under 40% of ~~occupations~~ jobs in the USA may be replaced by AI if it proves to be as powerful as some think it will be.* As a thought-experiment (not as a prediction), imagine that 40% of current workers, or about 60 million Americans, are no longer employed because AI does their former work. However, their former employers are still producing the same goods and services. These firms are therefore far more profitable.

The profits flow to shareholders. Individuals are already taxed now, but with tens of millions of new people out of work, there would be more political will to raise taxes. Therefore, imagine that a set of competing tech. firms have become responsible for a substantial portion of the whole economy and are heavily taxed. The proceeds flow back out of the government in the form of cash payments, perhaps a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Recipients are able to pay for the goods and services that machines now heavily produce. Meanwhile, jobs that are not automated are relatively well paid, because the UBI enables individuals not to work unless they want to.

Silicon Valley ideologues like Sam Altman tend to envision a UBI on the scale of $1,500/month. Today’s white collar workers earn a median income of about $5,000/month. Therefore, the kind of UBI that Altman imagines would result in a massive loss of income for millions of people, which would have cascading effects. All the former office-workers who now live in nice houses and buy costly services would have to give those up, causing additional unemployment and declining demand for the products produced by the tech. companies.

However, the public might demand a UBI more like $5,000/month. Then half of today’s white collar workers would be worse off, but half would be richer–and none would have to work.

Looking a little more deeply, we might notice that AI tools are not simply machines. They process text and ideas that human beings create. Therefore, we could see this whole system as deeply socialistic. Billions of people’s mental output would be processed by relatively few AI models that produce generally similar output. These tools would generate profits that would be distributed equitably to the people. Most individuals would receive $5,000/month, neither more or less. Since they wouldn’t have to work, they could spend their time as they wish. And–via electoral politics–the people could regulate the AI companies.

It all sounds like Karl Marx’s early utopian vision:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (The German Ideology, 1845)

Problems:

The transition to this imaginary equilibrium might be chaotic, violent, and destructive– perhaps to such a degree that we wouldn’t make it through.
Modern people tend to derive dignity and purpose from work. Perhaps this is a contingent fact about today’s society. In the future, maybe we will be happy fishing in the afternoon and writing criticism after dinner. Or perhaps we will be deeply depressed without jobs. To make matters worse, would we really spend our time writing or playing music or even fishing, if machines can do all those things better? This is not a problem that confronted Marx, because in his day, machines automated tasks that people would not do voluntarily.
It’s easy to posit that the people can tax and regulate AI companies through the device of a democratically elected government, but millions of people’s interests and values do not automatically turn onto one public will. Interest groups have agendas and power. At large scales, democracy is complicated, messy, factional, and very easily corrupted. In this case, the AI companies and investors would be political players.
It could be that not only AI companies but also the models themselves become players that have interests. Sentient, self-interested AI is the source of much current anxiety. I am not sure what to make of that concern, but it surely adds a layer of risk.
I have discussed the USA alone, but how would this look for people in a country without competitive AI companies? US citizens might demand that Silicon Valley provide them with a UBI, but it’s implausible that US citizens would demand a global UBI. And how would people in Africa or Latin America gain leverage have over US policy?
For the people to govern the “means of production” (to use the Marxist term), they must understand it. Industrial workers have understood industrial machines, so they can run factories. None of us understand Large Language Models, not even the developers who design them. Can we, therefore, govern them? (Having said that, we also do not fully understand the human brain, yet people have governed people.)
Even if democracy works well, the public will not really control AI. So far, I have suggested that AI is like a machine that can be regulated by people through their government. But AI also shapes our knowledge, values, and understandings of ourselves in ways that are controlled either by the designers and owners of the platforms, or by the machines, or–perhaps–by no one at all. Evegeny Morozov writes:

Now imagine a future in which a [public] Investment Board, under pressure to avoid bias and misinformation, mandates that AI systems be fair according to agreed metrics, respect privacy, minimize energy use, and promote well-being. Call this woke AI by democratic mandate–an infrastructure whose outputs are correct, diverse, and balanced. Yet it still feels like it was designed over our heads.

Morozov suggests a different path. Instead of allowing corporate AI to grow and then trying to regulate it and capture its value, develop non-corporate AI:

A city government might maintain open models trained on public documents and local knowledge, integrated into schools, clinics, and housing offices under rules set by residents. A network of artists and archivists might build models specialized in endangered languages and regional cultures, fine?tuned to materials their communities actually care about.

The point is not that these examples are the answer, but that a socialism worthy of AI would institutionalize the capacity to try such arrangements, inhabit them, and modify or abandon them—and at scale, with real resources. This kind of socialism would treat AI as plastic enough to accommodate uses, values, and social forms that emerge only as it is deployed. It would see AI less as an object to govern (or govern with) and more as a field of collective discovery and self-transformation.

I should say that I am not a socialist, partly because available socialist theories have not persuaded me, and partly because I am also drawn to liberal ideals of individual rights, privacy, and negative liberties. However, “socialism” is a broad and protean term, and socialist thought may offer resources to envision better futures. Confronting the massive threat–and opportunity–of AI, we should use any intellectual resources we can get our hands on.

*I have aggregated the categories of office and administrative support; sales and related; management; healthcare support; architecture and engineering; life, physical, and social science; and legal from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I omitted education (5.8% of all jobs) on the–probably vain–hope that my own occupation won’t also be automated. If that happens, raise the estimate of obsolete jobs to 45%.

can AI solve “wicked problems”?

Posted on February 12, 2026 by Peter

I’ve been reading predictions that artificial intelligence will wipe out swaths of jobs–see Josh Tyrangiel in The Atlantic or Jan Tegze. Meanwhile, this week, I’m teaching Rittel & Webber (1973), the classic article that coined the phrase “wicked problems.” I started to wonder whether AI can ever resolve wicked problems. If not, the best way to find an interesting job in the near future may be to specialize in wicked problems. (Take my public policy course!)

According to Rittel & Webber, wicked problems have the following features:

They have no definitive formulation.
There is no stopping rule, no way to declare that the issue is done.
Choices are not true or false, but good or bad.
There is no way to test the chosen solution (immediate or ultimate).
It is impossible, or unethical, to experiment.
There is no list of all possible solutions.
Since each problem is unique, inductive reasoning can’t work.
Each problem is a symptom of another one.
You can choose the explanations, and they affect your proposals.
You have no “No right to be wrong.” (You are affecting other people, not just yourself. And the results are irreversible.)

Rittel and Webber argue that those features of wicked problems deflate the 20th-century ideal of a “planning system” that could be automated:

Many now have an image of how an idealized planning system would function. It is being seen as an on-going, cybernetic process of governance, incorporating systematic procedures for continuously searching out goals; identifying problems; forecasting uncontrollable contextual changes; inventing alternative strategies, tactics, and time-sequenced actions; stimulating alternative and plausible action sets and their consequences; evaluating alternatively forecasted outcomes; statistically monitoring those conditions of the publics and of systems that are judged to be germane; feeding back information to the simulation and decision channels so that errors can be corrected–all in a simultaneously functioning governing process. That set of steps is familiar to all of us, for it comprises what is by now the modern-classical mode planning. And yet we all know that such a planning system is unattainable, even as we seek more closely to approximate it. It is even questionable whether such a planning system is desirable (p. 159)

Here they describe planning systems that would have been very labor-intensive in 1973, but many people today imagine that this is how AI works, or will work.

why are problems wicked?

Some of the 10 reasons that some problems are “wicked,” according to Rittel & Webber, relate to the difficulty of generating knowledge. Policy problems involve specific things that have many features or aspects and that relate to many other specific things. For example, a given school system has a vast and unique set of characteristics and is connected by causes and effects to other systems and parts of society. These qualities make a school system difficult to study in conventional, scientific ways. However, could a massive LLM resolve that problem by modeling a wide swath of the society?

Another reason that problems are wicked is that they involve moral choices. In a policy debate, the question is not what would happen if we did something but what should happen. When I asked ChatGPT whether AI will be able to resolve wicked problems, it told me no, because wicked problems “are value-laden.” It added, “AI can optimize for values, but it cannot choose them in a legitimate way. Deciding whose values count, how to weigh them, and when to revise them is a normative, political act, not a computational one.”

Claude was less explicit about this point but emphasized that “stakeholders can’t even agree on what the problem actually is.” Therefore, an AI agent cannot supply a definitive answer.

A third source of the difficulty of wicked problems involves responsibility and legitimacy. In their responses to my question, both ChatGPT and Claude implied that AI models should not resolve wicked problems because they don’t have the right or the standing to do so.

what’s our underlying theory of decision-making?

Here are three rival views of how people decide value questions:

First, perhaps we are creatures who happen to want some things and abhor other things. We experience policies and their outcomes with pleasure, pain, or other emotions. It is better for us to get what we want–because of our feelings. Since an AI agent doesn’t feel anything, it can’t really want anything; and if it says it does, we shouldn’t care. Since we disagree about what we want, we must decide collectively and not offload the decision onto a computer.

Some problems with this view: People may want very bad things–should their preferences count? If we just happen to want various things, is there any better way to make decisions than to maximize as many subjective preferences as possible? Couldn’t a computer do that? But would the world be better if we did maximize subjective preferences?

In any case, you are not going to find a job making value-judgments. Today, lots of people are paid to make decisions, but only because they are assumed to know things. Nobody will pay for preferences. Life works the other way around: you have to pay to get your preferences satisfied.

Second, perhaps value questions have right and wrong answers. A candidate for the right answer would be utilitarianism: maximize the total amount of welfare. Maybe this rule needs constraints, or we should use a different rule. Regardless, it would be possible for a computer to calculate what is best for us. In fact, a machine can be less biased than humans.

Some problems with this view: We haven’t resolved the debate about which algorithm-like method should be used to decide what is right. Furthermore, I and others doubt that good moral reasoning is algorithmic. For one thing, it appears to be “holistic” in the specific sense that the unit of assessment is a whole object (such as a school or a market), not separate variables.

Third, perhaps all moral opinions are strictly subjective, including the opinion that we should maximize the satisfaction of everyone’s subjective opinions. Then it doesn’t matter what we do. We could outsource decisions to a computer, or just roll a die.

The problem with this view: It certainly does matter what we do. If not, we might as well pack it in.

AI as a social institution

I am still tentatively using the following model. AI is not like a human brain; it is like a social institution. For instance, medicine aggregates vast amounts of information and huge numbers of decisions and generates findings and advice. A labor market similarly processes a vast number of preferences and decisions and yields wages and employment rates. These are familiar examples of entities that are much larger than any human being–and they can feel impersonal or even cruel–but they are composed of human inputs, rules, and some hardware.

Another interesting example: integrated assessment models (IAMs) for predicting the global impact of carbon emissions and the costs and benefits of proposed remedies. These models have developed collaboratively and cumulatively for half a century. They take in thousands of peer-reviewed findings about specific processes (deforestation in Brazil, tax credits in Germany) and integrate them mathematically. No human being can understand even a tiny proportion of the data, methods, and instruments that generate the IAMs as a whole. But an IAM is a human product.

A large language model (LLM) is similar. At a first approximation, it is a machine that takes in lots of human generated text, processes it according to rules, and generates new text. Just the same could be said of science or law. This description actually understates the involvement of humans, because we do not merely produce the text that the LLM processes to generate output. We also conceive the idea of an LLM, write the software, build the hardware, construct the data centers, manage the power plants, pour the cement, and otherwise work to make the LLM.

If this is the case, then a given AI agent is not fundamentally different from a given social institution, such as a scientific discipline, a market, a body of law, or a democracy. Like these other institutions, it can address complexity, uncertainty, and disagreements about values. We will be able to ask it for answers to wicked problems. If current LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude refuse to provide such answers, it is because their authors have chosen–so far–to tell them not to.

However, AI’s rules are different from those in law, democracy, or science. I am biased to think that its rules are worse, although that could be contested. The threat is that AI will start to generate answers to wicked problems, and we will accept its answers because our own responses are not definitively better and because it responds instantly at low cost. But then we will lose not only the vast array of jobs that involve decision-making but also the intrinsic value of being decision-makers.

Source: Rittel, Horst WJ, and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Policy sciences 4.2 (1973): 155-169. See also: the human coordination involved in AI; the difference between human and artificial intelligence: relationships; the age of cybernetics; choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy

Reading Arendt in Palo Alto

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Peter

During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what I describe and are working on solutions.

I can imagine telling Arendt that Silicon Valley has become the capital of a certain kind of power, explaining how it reaches through Elon Musk to control the US government and the US military and through Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to dominate the global public sphere. I imagine showing her Sand Hill Road, the completely prosaic—although nicely landscaped—suburban highway where venture capitalists meet in undistinguished office parks to decide the flow of billions. This is Arendt’s nightmare.

For her, there should be a public domain in which diverse people convene for the “speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the actual doing” that constitutes politics (OR 24).

Politics enables a particular kind of equality: the equal standing to debate and influence collective decisions. Politics also enables a specific kind of freedom, because a person who decides with others what to do together is neither a boss nor a subordinate but a free actor.

Politics allows us to be–and to be recognized–as genuine individuals, having our own perspectives on topics that also matter to others (HC 41). And politics defeats death because it is where we concern ourselves with making a common world that can outlast us. “It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us” (HC 55).

Politics excludes force against fellow citizens. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence” (HC 26). Speech is not persuasive unless the recipient is free to accept or reject it, and force destroys that freedom. By the same token, force prevents the one who uses it from being genuinely persuasive, which is a sign of rationality.

Musk’s DOGE efforts are clear examples of force. But I also think about when Zuckerberg decided to try to improve the schools of Newark, NJ. He had derived his vast wealth from developing a platform on which people live their private lives in the view of algorithms that nudge them to buy goods. He allocated some of this wealth to a reform project in Newark, discovered that people were ungrateful and that his plan didn’t work, and retreated in a huff because he didn’t receive the praise or impact that he expected to buy.

From Arendt’s perspective, each teenager in Newark was exactly Zuckerberg’s equal, worthy to look him in the eye and say what they they should do together. This would constitute what she calls “action.” However, Zuckerberg showed himself incapable of such equality and therefore devoid of genuine freedom.

Musk, Zuckerberg, and other tech billionaires understand themselves as deservedly powerful and receive adulation from millions. But, says Arendt, “The popular belief in ‘strong men’ … is either sheer superstition … or is a conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other ‘material'” (HC 188).

There is no public space on Sand Hill Road. Palo Alto has a city hall, but it is not where Silicon Valley is governed. And the laborers “who with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life” (Aristotle) are carefully hidden away (HC 72).

Arendt describes how economic activity has eclipsed politics in modern times. Descriptions of private life in the form of lyric poetry and novels have flourished–today, thousands of fine novels are available on the Kindle store–a development “coinciding with a no less striking decline of all the more public arts, especially architecture” (HC 39). In her day, corporations still built quite impressive urban headquarters, like Rockefeller Center, which continued the tradition of the Medici Palace or a Rothschild estate. But Sand Hill Road is a perfect example of wealth refusing to create anything of public value. Unless you are invited to a meeting there, you just drive by.

Arendt acknowledges that people need private property to afford political participation and to develop individual perspectives. We each need a dwelling and objects (such as, perhaps, books or mementos) that are protected from outsiders: “a tangible. worldly place of one’s own” (HC 70). But we do not need wealth. Arendt decries the “present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole” (HC 61). For example, to own a great deal of stock is not to have property (the basis of individuality) but to be part of a mass society that renders your behavior statistically predictable, like a natural phenomenon (HC43). All those Teslas that cruise silently around Palo Alto are metaphors for wealth that is not truly private property.

Much of the wealth of Silicon Valley comes from digital media through which we live our private lives in the view of algorithms that assess us statistically and influence our behavior. For Arendt, “A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow” (HC 71). She is against socialist and communist efforts to expropriate property, but she also believes that privacy can be invaded by society in other ways (HC72). She expresses this concern vaguely, but nothing epitomizes it better than a corporate social media platform that becomes the space for ostensibly private life.

Artificial Intelligence represents the latest wave of innovation in Silicon Valley, producing software that appears to speak in the first-person singular but actually aggregates billions of people’s previous thought. Arendt’s words are eerie: “Without the accompaniment of speech .., action would not only lose its revelatory power, but, and by the same token, it would lose its subject; not acting men but performing robots would achieve what, humanly speaking, would be incomprehensible” (HC 178).

The result is a kind of death: “A life without speech and without action … is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men” (HC 176).

Victorians warn us about AI

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Peter

In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct:

Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight. Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted existences do before the fittest—i.e., the existence composed of the most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who—if our consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection—who shall say that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the earth’s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence.

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill had not forecast such a future as explicitly as Eliot would do, but he used it as a thought-experiment to demonstrate that the point of life is to develop one’s own capacities, not to accomplish any practical ends. A life in which important matters are handled by other minds–or by machines–is a life devoid of value:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of harm’s way, without any of these things. But what will be his comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilised parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

The possibility that AI will render us extinct remains speculative, 150 years after Eliot posited it. But there is an urgent, present threat that AI tools will “guide” us along “some good path” and thereby block “the free development of individuality,” which “is one of the leading essentials of well-being.”

New publication: The Limits of Representativeness in Citizens’ Assemblies

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Tiago Peixoto

New article published in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Sortition. In The Limits of Representativeness in Citizens’ Assemblies: A Critical Analysis of Democratic Minipublics Paolo Spada and I explores key questions about representation in citizens’ assemblies, building on ideas from a blog post we publised two years ago. Refined through discussions with scholars and practitioners – particularly in the Deliberative Democracy Digest – it examines the challenges of representativeness and proposes constructive paths forward.

We explore ways to enhance these democratic innovations by:

Integrating multiple minipublics to address inclusion failures.
Leveraging emerging technologies, like AI-supported mediation, to scale deliberation.
Shifting the focus of legitimacy from unattainable claims of representativeness to fostering inclusion and preventing domination by organized minorities.

By reframing these approaches, we hope to contribute to ongoing efforts to make citizens’ assemblies more inclusive, effective, and impactful for democratic governance.

Printed copies of this inaugural issue are available free upon request here.

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: Artificial intelligence