Nature, Culture, AI and the Common Good – Considering AI’s Place in Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature

Abstract

This paper considers the place and the role of AI in the pursuit of the common good. The notion of the common good has a long and venerable history in social philosophy, but this notion, so it is argued, becomes problematic with the imminent advent of Artificial General Intelligence. Should AI be regarded as being in the service of the common good of humanity, or should the definition of the social common rather be enlarged to include non-human entities in general, and AI’s, which in the future may include human level and superhuman level AI’s, in particular? The paper aims to clarify the questions and the concepts involved by interpreting Bruno Latour’s proposal for a politics of nature with specific reference to the challenge posed by the imminent advent of human level artificial general intelligence (AGI). The recent suggestion by eminent AI researcher, Stuart Russell, that the pursuit of AI should be re-oriented towards AI that remain in the service of the human good, will be used as a critical interlocutor of Latour’s model. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the challenge will be to steer a middle ground between two unacceptable extremes. On the one hand the extreme of a “truth politics” that assumes there is a pure human nature and definite human interests that must be protected against AI should be avoided. On the other hand, the alternative extreme of a naked “power politics” must also be avoided because there is a very real possibility that super AI may emerge victorious out of such a power struggle.