Comment by Shannon Vallor

Just as when Jonas wrote at the height of the Cold War, today the security of the human family hangs on our capacity for wise self-governance and collective political reason in service of shared values. Yet we believe in these things with far less sincerity and fervor than we did in the 18th century. As philosopher of technology Langdon Winner observed in 1986, even the concept of ‘shared values’ has lost its capacity to help us wisely steer technological development to desirable ends, since we no longer see ‘values’ as we once did, as objective features of a desirable and just state of human affairs to be pursued by democratic processes. Instead, we see values as personal, arbitrary whims of individuals, immune to political challenge and reasoned deliberation. We substitute the older, harder question of democracy that this country’s founders asked – in Winner’s words, ‘how are we to live together, gracefully and with justice?’ – with the technocrat’s cheap replacement: ‘how can we calculate the sum of individual human preferences?’ [...] We can add to that list the need to safely govern AI. We have the same need for democratic renewal now as we did then, only more so, as global confidence in political reason guided by democratic norms is even lower than when Jonas and Winner wrote.