Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
MacIntyre's After Virtue provides the practice-tradition-institution framework within which Vallor's technomoral virtues must be situated: virtues are achievements of practices, and practices require communities to sustain the internal standards that define excellence.
Polanyi's tacit dimension — we can know more than we can tell — is the epistemological foundation of Vallor's friction argument: the embodied, pre-reflective competence that skilled practice builds cannot be articulated, which means it cannot be replaced by an articulate AI system.
Dreyfus's stage model of skill acquisition — from novice to expert — maps precisely onto Vallor's argument about courage: the practitioner must traverse the painful early stages without shortcuts, or the expert's fluid competence never develops.
Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft defends skilled manual work as the site of a form of agency and intelligence that the knowledge economy has systematically undervalued — directly complementing Vallor's argument about what is lost when friction is removed.
Borgmann's device paradigm names the structural move that AI tools make at scale: concealing the machinery of delivery while severing the practitioner from the engagement that sustained character — the invisible curriculum's architectural form.
Illich's tools for conviviality provides the design standard Vallor's chapter on virtue-sensitive design is attempting to recover: tools are convivial when they amplify the practitioner's own vision rather than substituting for it.
Han's aesthetics of the smooth and auto-exploitation thesis illuminate the structural demand that AI tools make on their users: the burnout society's achievement subject is the same subject Vallor identifies as threatened by perpetual-optimization culture.
Bandura's self-efficacy construct — the belief in one's capacity to act effectively — is the psychological mechanism underneath Vallor's justice chapter: AI tools that build hollow confidence displace genuine self-efficacy with performance without competence.
Dewey's pragmatism — learning through reflection on experience, not through passive reception — is the epistemological ground beneath Vallor's invisible curriculum chapter: AI eliminates the failures through which reflective learning occurs.
Antonovsky's salutogenic framework — what keeps people resilient rather than what makes them sick — frames the AI question as Vallor does: not whether the tools cause harm by failing, but what capacities they silently erode when they succeed.
Zuboff's surveillance capitalism analysis complements Vallor's justice chapter: the unequal distribution of virtue-forming friction maps onto the unequal distribution of behavioral surplus — those who produce the data bear the moral costs, those who monetize it capture the gains.
Sennett's The Craftsman defends the dignity of skilled making as a source of both meaning and moral character — the direct complement to Vallor's argument that the removal of formative friction removes the conditions for the development of both.
