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The Public Intellectual Is Dead. And AI Has Killed Them.
5 min readOct 9
Once upon a time, public intellectuals routinely made it into the news to discuss political, economic, medical, and scientific issues. To some extent, this is still true, but the appreciation for expertise has been eroded over time. Large parts of the political spectrum do not trust experts, unless, of course, they agree with what they already believe. Western democracies have often been derided for being technocratic and giving too much power to so-called experts. The scientific experts invited to participate in the political decision-making process are frequently derided for straying beyond their field of expertise. While there is a risk in that, of course, it is a largely unrealized one compared to a much more significant risk: that of the ignorant straying beyond their field of competence.
But there is a difference between a public intellectual and an expert. Public intellectuals, for the most part, have won prestige and recognition for their intellectual contributions in one area of intellectual inquiry, whether that is history, economics, psychology, philosophy, and so forth, and have used this credibility to become household names and participate in the public debates of our day. For the most part, they are a welcome corrective to whoever else makes it onto public talk shows, such as populists and celebrities. Usually, they are better informed, more rational, more evidence-based, and less prone to sweeping statements.
But that’s not always true.
For public intellectuals, given this situation, are frequently surrounded by people who know less and celebrated for their opinions in the belief that they are better informed, more rational, and to be believed. This can breed arrogance and slowly erode intellectual humility.
No surprise, then, that public intellectuals are routinely criticized by their academic peers. Yuval Noah Harari, for instance, notoriously received a lot of flak for his grand statements about history and later AI. When it was announced that he would publish a new book on the laws of history, boiling it all down to six laws, the public reaction from historians was largely ridicule.
Why? Because history does not have laws. Discovering them is not what historians do. In any case, Harari is at least a historian. But public intellectuals, used to commenting on everything, have found themselves recently in a bit of an uncomfortable predicament as the rapid advances in AI have encroached on almost all public debates. While every intellectual absorbes a basic understanding of economics, politics, and other facts relevant for the discourse to give reasonable takes, this is not true when it comes to artificial intellegence.
The background knowledge required to not sound like an ignorant buffon is incredibly high. And yet, public intellectuals are drawn to commenting on AI issues like sharks who have smelled blood. And much like sharks they give off the impression of having lost all reason, more interested in professing their own intuitions about things, than to show intellectual humility in the face of great uncertainty. Yet, when it comes to the following three questions, we have seen an absurd amount of confidence displayed in the public discourse:
All of these questions involve a great deal of uncertainty and have received rigorous discussion by experts. However, public intellectuals have taken to platforms like X and public broadcasts to ridicule and mock the very raising of these questions. As Henry Shevlin put it:
When pressed by people who are actually working on these issues, it quickly turned out that many of these public intellectuals had little to offer in terms of arguments, which I found quite disappointing.
Of course, given the public need for reassurance and the media’s love for simple messaging, simple answers to complex questions get a lot of attention. What if AIs could become conscious and develop welfare needs? “That’s just nonsense!” Should we care about potential AI interests? “That’s anti-human!” Could AI lead to catastrophic effects for the human race? “Anyone expressing these worries is just a doomer and a member of an apocalyptic cult!”
Scott Alexander recently challenged Steven Pinker to a debate because Pinker made all of these assertions about serious researchers working in the AI space. The exchange between them can be read here. The result, in my eyes, and that of many was a bit of a humiliation for Pinker, with Scott elegantly using Pinker’s own confident statements against him, such as claiming that deep learning had peaked in 2019:
The best sign of a real public intellectual, of course, is to defer to experts on occasion, to admit that one was wrong, but all too often, public intellectuals double down, engaging in the spurious search for cherry-picked evidence to support a position they’ve committed themselves to earlier, as if admitting they were wrong was a threat to their status as public intellectuals. Scott’s declaration that he wants to debate Pinker to convert him towards his own professed values is especially poignant:
I want to debate you so I can convert you to Pinkerism. Pinkerism rejects facile non-arguments and cherry-picked fake experts in favor of scientific consensus and rational thinking. It gracefully avoids both fatalist doomerism and dogmatic denialism in favor of confronting problems head-on. I believe that you are fertile soil for conversion to this ideology.
That we are all prone to do this, of course, is well known. Cognitive biases exist aplenty. Luckily, science is self-correcting and does not depend on individuals. It is a collective enterprise. But as a collective, it is simply false to state that any of these questions about AI are even remotely settled, absurd, or anti-human.
Sometimes it’s fine to acknowledge that there is simply great uncertainty and no easy answers to be had. And I say all that as someone who is very skeptical about AI doom, AI consciousness, and AI welfare. But one still has to meet those arguments head on, not just attack straw-men.
The model of the public intellectual remains tied to the idea of science as a succession of the Greats. Of great individuals who revolutionize science. But modern science is a collective social endeavour. Knowledge is greatly dispersed and will only become more dispersed as we move further into the future. And this development will inevitably make public intellectuals less and less relevant, while making teams of experts all the more important.
Come what may, we will soon reach the point where the most advanced large language models with access to the world’s research databases will be able to give more informed answers to the questions we may once have asked public intellectuals, than any intellectual without years of learning about these fields could ever hope to achieve. The public intellectual sought to comment on all domains is probably a thing of the past.
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