The Slavish Labor of Self-Governance: Cognitive Enfeeblement and Political Legitimacy

The Institute of Philosophy hosts Nathaniel Sharadin for a research talk on June 18th, at 3-4:30pm, in room G301, Gimli, University of Iceland. The talk is entitled “The Slavish Labor of Self-Governance: Cognitive Enfeeblement and Political Legitimacy” and will be in English.

Abstract

People are presently outsourcing cognitive labor to machines; combined with our nature as cognitive misers, the predictable result is that people will do less cognitive labor themselves and, over time, become somewhat stupider. A natural objection is that this is a moral panic. We've offloaded cognition to writing, calculators, and GPS before, and our cognition is mostly fine. This is an optimistic picture. Why think that this time, it's different? This time is not different; but we should not be optimistic. Earlier technologies offloaded first-order skills we could afford to lose; modern AI assistants target our core regulatory skills -- a suite of practice-dependent cognitive capacities that underwrite autonomous agency. These we cannot afford to lose. This is a pessimistic picture. In this talk, I am primarily interested in the consequences of this pessimistic picture for political legitimacy. I argue that if we face more or less widespread cognitive enfeeblement, the result is what I call wholesale political delegitimisation. The argument is therefore conditional, but I'll spend some time making the antecedent plausible.

A short biography of the speaker

Nathaniel Sharadin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of two books, including Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Work (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and numerous articles in journals including Ethics, Philosophical Studies, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. A former CAIS Philosophy Fellow and Notre Dame Faculty Fellow, he is currently writing and thinking about the impacts of emerging technology on human moral and cognitive development.