If AI Thinks for Us, Democracy Will Suffer

If AI thinks for us, democracy will suffer

CHICAGO — Sometime in the 18th century, the Enlightenment settled a contentious, centuries-old question: Where does knowledge come from? For millennia, many people had pointed to God. But the early modern period brought a new consensus, namely that knowledge comes from human scientists working at the edge of what is known, armed with observation, mathematics, experimentation, and logic. As the historian Steven Shapin has noted, this was a social…