My dear husband gave me a subscription to the Daunts book for my birthday, so I get a new paperback with my lucky dip every month. The most recent one belonged to my colleague David Lanceman. Handover: How to control our lives with businesses, states and AIIt was first released in 2023. I hadn’t read it yet, as David writes too many books for me to catch up. The core argument is that human society has already transferred many decision-making powers to non-human entities: states and businesses.
I’ve read most of it Books “Yes, but…”, that’s a decent discussion, but it’s not watertight, so I’m thinking about it. It starts with Hobbes and the ideas of non-humans who have developed in different institutional forms. An important difference from decisions made by mechanical agents appears to be in the lack of autonomy or openness of change or relief. And to change it, they must be part of a state or business, not a separate entity.
Books But I’m acknowledging this towards the end. “If a machine decides what happens next, no matter how intelligent the process that the choice arrives, some decisions require direct human input, so that’s the only human. He links this back to the claim that the state is a “political machine” or “artificial decision maker”, so there’s no real difference between the state and AIS, but this also uses AI in the political realm as part of the state machine.
He concludes: “For now, the bigger choice is whether the state’s artificial agencies are joining human intelligence or artificial intelligence.” Does ai crowd humanity? Looking at the US now, this seems like a question from another era, a more gentle era. The new administration there integrated states, businesses and AI into the dwarf giants of Hobbes’ Leviathan.
