Jonathan Glover — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The Moral Identity of the Builder Chapter 2: The Human Response and Its New Antagonists Chapter 3: The Machinery of Moral Self-Construction Chapter 4: Moral Resources and the Invisible Water Chapter 5: The Tribal Epistemology of the AI Discourse Chapter 6: Distance, Diffusion, and the Architecture of Carelessness Chapter 7: The Luddite's Grief and the Ethics of Transition Chapter 8: The Smooth and the Anesthesia of the Moral Sense Chapter 9: The Child's Question and the Conditions for Moral Inquiry Chapter 10: Toward a Moral Psychology of Worthy Amplification Epilogue Back Cover
Jonathan Glover Cover

Jonathan Glover

On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Jonathan Glover. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Jonathan Glover's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

By Edo Segal

The passage I almost did not delete is the one that brought me to Glover.

I have described it elsewhere in *You On AI* — the moment Claude produced a paragraph about democratization that was eloquent, well-structured, and hit every note I wanted to hit. I nearly kept it. Then I realized I could not tell whether I believed the argument or just liked how it sounded. I deleted it, went to a coffee shop, wrote by hand for two hours until I found the version that was mine.

Moral Identity Glover
Moral Identity Glover

That episode troubled me for weeks. Not because of the authorship question — I had already made my peace with the collaboration. What troubled me was the ease of the acceptance. How close I came

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Jonathan Glover — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 46 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Jonathan Glover — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

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Alasdair MacIntyre
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Jonathan Glover — On AI
11 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair MacIntyre
MacIntyre's After Virtue argues that moral concepts only make sense embedded in practices and traditions — a framework that directly illuminates why Glover insists moral identity is built through action, not principle. The internal goods of craft and institutional practices are what the aesthetics of the smooth erodes.
Shannon Vallor
Shannon Vallor
Vallor's technomoral virtues are the applied complement to Glover's moral identity framework — she asks how technology shapes the cultivation of virtue, and which virtues AI-assisted environments tend to suppress.
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
Han's aesthetics of the smooth and burnout society diagnosis appear explicitly in ch7 as the cultural regime that removes moral friction. Glover's framework gives Han's aesthetic observation its moral-psychological grounding.
Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
Murdoch's concept of moral attention — the disciplined practice of seeing clearly rather than through the lens of ego and desire — is the philosophical tradition Glover's human response inhabits. Her moral vision maps onto his involuntary recognition.
Matthew Crawford
Matthew Crawford
Crawford's defense of skilled manual engagement — the moral value of inhabiting a task fully, decision by decision — is the craftsman's version of Glover's argument that the friction of implementation creates moral encounters.
Albert Borgmann
Albert Borgmann
Borgmann's device paradigm names the structural shift from focal practices that engage the whole person to commodious devices that deliver results without engagement — the same move Glover indicts when AI eliminates the implementation journey.
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Illich's tools for conviviality draws the threshold between tools that expand human agency and tools that produce institutional dependency — a distinction that maps directly onto Glover's framework for distinguishing moral-friction-preserving from moral-friction-eliminating technological mediation.
Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt
Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil — ordinary bureaucrats performing functions within systems whose moral weight they never confronted — is the intellectual ancestor Glover's diagnostic framework explicitly extends and applies to the AI moment.
Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams
Williams' moral luck argument — that moral responsibility cannot be cleanly separated from circumstances outside the agent's control — provides the philosophical context for Glover's insistence that moral identity is built through accumulated choice under structural constraint.
Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett
Sennett's The Craftsman defends the moral significance of skilled engagement with materials over time — the same developmental journey through implementation that Glover's framework identifies as the space where the human response surfaces and moral identity is built.
Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas
Levinas' ethics of the face — the claim that the encounter with another person's face is the origin of moral obligation — is the philosophical tradition Glover's human response inhabits. Where Levinas is ontological, Glover is empirical; both arrive at the primacy of the particular encounter.

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