Two Boston University law professors, Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey, have just published the preprint of a new article that blew me away, titled How AI is destroying institutions. I invite you to read it – and think about it – as soon as possible.
Here is the summary.
I hope that before the article is finally published, the authors will insert the word “Generative” before “AI” in the title, since the force of their criticism is (as the last sentence of the abstract acknowledges) actually about current approaches, not all possible approaches to AI that one could imagine.
But wow. This is one of the most lucid and powerful articles I have read in years. Here is the opening paragraph.
If you wanted to create a tool for destroying the institutions that support democratic life, you couldn’t do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and tech oligarchs are deploying AI systems to gut public institutions with astonishing alacrity. The institutions that structure public governance, the rule of law, education, healthcare, journalism, and families are all poised to be “enhanced” by AI. AI advocates defend the technology’s role in dismantling our vital support structures by arguing that AI systems are merely efficiency “tools” without substantive meaning. But predictive and generative AI systems are not just neutral ways to help executives, bureaucrats, and elected leaders do what they were going to do anyway, but more cost-effectively. The very design of these systems is contrary to and degrades the essential functions of essential civic institutions, such as administrative agencies and universities.
In the third paragraph, they state their central point:
In this article, we hope to convince you of one simple and urgent point: the current design of artificial intelligence systems facilitates the degradation and destruction of our essential civic institutions. Even if predictive and generative AI systems are not directly used to eradicate these institutions, AI systems, by their nature, weaken institutions to the point of weakening them. To clarify, we are not claiming that AI is a neutral or general-purpose tool that can be used to destroy these institutions. Rather, we argue that the current core functionality of AI – that is, if used as designed – will gradually impose detrimental consequences on the institutions that support modern democratic life. The more AI is deployed in our existing economic and social systems, the more institutions will become fixed and delegitimized. Whether or not tech companies intend to destroy these systems, the core attributes of AI systems are antithetical to the kind of cooperation, transparency, accountability, and evolution that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.
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Another amazing thing about the diary is its history. I was so impressed that I wrote a fan mail to the first author, Woodrow Hartzog, asking how the journal came about. It turns out that Hartzog and his co-author Jessica Silbey had originally planned to write a much more positive essay, but reality set in. Honestly, they followed reality wherever it led them:
The origin of this article is that it was originally intended as a brief and provocative follow-up to a very short article we wrote years ago entitled “The advantage of Deep Fakes,” where we asserted that “deep fakes do not create new problems but worsen existing ones…Journalism, education, individual rights, democratic systems and voting protocols have long been vulnerable. Deep fakes might just be the straw that breaks them. And therein lies the opportunity for (deep and structural) repair.
However, as we began to write this paper, we realized that the threat that AI poses to institutions was much greater than we had anticipated. We also realized that we were far too optimistic about the eventual desire to save the institutions. So we tried to write something concise and urgent that exposes the various ways in which the design of AI systems has contributed to weakening institutions to the point of collapse.
Read the has all the paper here.