Lorraine Daston — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The History of Objectivity Is a History of Overconfidence Chapter 2: When the Photograph Replaced the Drawing Chapter 3: The Confidence Artifact Chapter 4: Statistical Fluency as False Authority Chapter 5: The Calibration Problem Chapter 6: What Each Era's Users Had to Learn Chapter 7: The Period of Costly Errors Chapter 8: Institutional Adaptation and the Architecture of Calibrated Trust Chapter 9: The Historical Pattern and What It Predicts Chapter 10: The Alien in the Archive Epilogue Back Cover
Lorraine Daston Cover

Lorraine Daston

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 Lorraine Daston. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Lorraine Daston'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 sentence that made me put my laptop down was about a flower.

Not a real flower. A drawing of one. An eighteenth-century botanical illustration, commissioned by a scientist who told the artist: Don't draw the plant on the table. Draw the species. Smooth out the insect damage. Straighten the crooked stem. Remove everything that makes this particular specimen particular, and give me the ideal.

The artist did. The image was beautiful. And for two hundred years, the scientific community treated that beauty as proof that the image was true.

Confidence Artifact Daston
Confidence Artifact Daston

I read that and felt the blood leave my face. Because I had been doing the same thing with Claude for months.

Not with flowers. With ideas. I would describe a half-formed thought, and Claude would

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Lorraine Daston — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 11 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Lorraine Daston — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

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Ludwik Fleck
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Lorraine Daston — On AI
12 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Ludwik Fleck
Ludwik Fleck
Fleck's concept of the thought style and thought collective is Daston's acknowledged precursor for historical epistemology; directly cited in ch4
Michael Polanyi
Michael Polanyi
Polanyi's tacit knowledge is a crucial resource for understanding what calibrated judgment requires beyond explicit rules
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Latour's science studies on the social construction of facts and laboratory life is core context for Daston's historical epistemology
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Simon's bounded rationality illuminates why heuristics like fluency-as-authority persist even when they fail
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Popper's philosophy of falsification and the demarcation problem is the classic background to Daston's critique of confidence artifacts
John Dewey
John Dewey
Dewey's pragmatist epistemology — knowledge as inquiry embedded in communities — resonates with Daston's moral economy framework
Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Dreyfus
Dreyfus's critique of AI's inability to replicate skilled embodied judgment maps directly onto Daston's defense of trained judgment
Terry Winograd
Terry Winograd
Winograd's work on computers and human understanding illuminates the gap between syntactic fluency and semantic authority
John Searle
John Searle
Searle's Chinese Room argument is a key reference point for understanding AI as alien intelligence without genuine understanding
Andy Clark
Andy Clark
Clark's extended mind thesis helps contextualize the depth atrophy problem when AI offloads cognitive work
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway
Haraway's situated knowledge critiques the same ideology of mechanical objectivity that Daston historicizes
Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce
Peirce's semiotic theory of signs and inquiry grounds Daston's analysis of how surface features become epistemic warrants

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