497
AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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A tool is a tool. What matters is who is using it and for what.
True, and yet a machine gun is a not a stethoscope.
A machine gun is a tool that is made with one purpose. A better comparison would be a hunting rifle, or even a hammer.
That... was my point!
No, a hammer is useful.
Right. It's small, and compact, so you can fit in the bike, and quick swing to someone's Dome just about does it. /s
Violence is a method of action, some tools are force multipliers in that action, and thus useful in that case.
Don't get me wrong, hammers building houses and plow shears have done more to quietly change the world then guns and swords ever have, but guns and swords have.
Sure. And removing those force multipliers from play can affect the state of the game.
When we get enough hammer murders, then we can talk about restricting hammer use.
I mention hammers because they used a popular biker gang weapon to honest. Quite a bit of murders done with hammers.
Okay? So does it meaningfully help to restrict hammer use or doesn't it? I'm the one asking the question, you're just kind of handwaving it away, as if restricting hammers would be "ridiculous."
Sorry I guess there is a bit of a casm of understanding between us here. Yeah restricting hammers, heavy hard objects on a pole found crafted throughout human civilization, does sound neigh impossible to me.
There's a lot you can do, actually. You can put people in jail, for one. Possession in non-designated areas, such as a construction site or a personal residence, could lead to confiscation and a misdemeanor. It can just be socially impolite to have one around people—you know, like your car keys are after you've been drinking.
The chasm of understanding is that you don't want to do anything—literally anything—about abuse in your society.
And for what? So that chatgpt can give you advice on what to order next from your burrito taxi? So that you don't have to go through the pain of writing a long email to your boss that he's going to summarize with the same AI service anyway?
I don't think being able to generate funny looking pictures is worth letting Palantir, another pet project of the vampire Peter Thiel, create a nightmare social-credit system actually worthy of 1984 to deter union advocacy, palastinian-genocide protest, being remotely anti-Trump—anything found disagreeable to the state—from ever realistically happening again. In all countries, mind you.
We can't do anything about that?
...
You know what else we can't do anything about? Global Warming. When the water wars finally kill us, I suppose I'll come greet you in hell.
You seem to think we disagree on creation of a police state or massive surveillance system being a bad thing for some reason. None of which are stopped with regulations by the states that are funding and building said things ...
I don’t like this way of thinking about technology, which philosophers of tech call the "instrumental" theory. Instead, I think that technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that simpler tools, like a hammer or or whatever, don't help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology.
In making technology, engineers and designers are constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. There are lots of ways to solve the same problem, each of which is equally valid, but those decisions still have to get made. How those decisions get made is the process through which we embed social values into the technology, which are cumulative in time. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them. We wouldn't even be fighting about self-driving cars had we made different technological choices a while back.
That said, on the other side, just because technology is more than just a tool, and does have values embedded within it, doesn't mean that the use of a technology is deterministic. People find subversive ways to use technologies in ways that go against the values that are built into it.
If this topic interests you, Andrew Feenberg's book Transforming Technology argues this at great length. His work is generally great and mostly on this topic or related ones.
Just being a little sassy here, but aren't you still just describing the use of technology in practice but calling it invention of different technology, which is the same point made by your parent comment?
I get your point and it's funny but it's different in important ways that are directly relevant to the OP article. The parent uses the instrumental theory of technology to dismiss the article, which is roughly saying that antidemocracy is a property of AI. I'm saying that not only is that a valid argument, but that these kinds of properties are important, cumulative, and can fundamentally reshape our society.
What about a tool using a tool using a tool?
Toolception
Story of my life, yak shaving to no end.