Into the darkness?

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…