Larry Laudan — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: Research Traditions in the AI Discourse Chapter 2: The Problem-Solving Model of Progress Chapter 3: Empirical Problems — What the Evidence Can and Cannot Show Chapter 4: Conceptual Problems — Flow, Compulsion, and the Demarcation Crisis Chapter 5: The Fishbowl Problem — Evaluating Traditions from Within Chapter 6: Residual Problems and the Luddite Debt Chapter 7: Ascending Friction and the Evaluation of Problem-Shifts Chapter 8: The Smooth as Methodological Vice Chapter 9: The Child's Question and the Limits of Problem-Solving Chapter 10: Toward a Progressive Rationality of AI Adoption Epilogue Back Cover
Larry Laudan Cover

Larry Laudan

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 Larry Laudan. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Larry Laudan'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 argument I could not win was with myself.

For months I had been making the case — in boardrooms, at dinner tables, in the pages of *You On AI* — that AI is an amplifier, that the river of intelligence is widening, that the question is not whether to build but what to build and for whom. I believed it. I still believe it. But somewhere over the Atlantic, laptop open, Claude humming alongside me, I caught myself unable to answer a simpler question: How would I know if I was wrong?

Research Traditions
Research Traditions

Not wrong about a detail. Wrong about the whole frame. Wrong about whether the gains outweigh the losses. Wrong about whether ascending friction is real or just a story I tell

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Larry Laudan — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 32 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Larry Laudan — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

Open the Wiki Companion →
Karl Popper
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Larry Laudan — On AI
11 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Popper's falsifiability criterion is the precursor to Laudan's demarcation thinking — Chapter 8 invokes Popper's critique of psychoanalysis as the analogue for AI's smoothness vice. Both share the discipline of specifying what would count as disconfirmation.
Michael Polanyi
Michael Polanyi
Polanyi's tacit knowledge is what the elegist tradition mourns and what the Luddite debt analysis puts into economic terms. The senior engineer's intuition that Claude cannot replicate is Polanyian knowing — the kind built through friction.
Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Dreyfus
Dreyfus's critique of AI's inability to replicate embodied, situated expertise maps directly onto Chapter 6's residual problems argument — the kind of knowing that friction builds and automation cannot preserve.
Albert Borgmann
Albert Borgmann
Borgmann's device paradigm — technology that conceals its workings and removes engagement — is the philosophical precursor to the smooth's methodological vice. Chapter 8's diagnosis of acceptance-without-verification is Borgmannian.
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Illich's counterproductivity thesis — tools that exceed their threshold begin to negate their own purpose — parallels Chapter 1's analysis of triumphalist anomalies: work intensification and compulsion as signs that the amplifier is overdriving the circuit.
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour
Latour's actor-network theory provides the sociology of how research traditions stabilize — the alliances between tools, methods, and social arrangements that make traditions cohere and resist falsification.
John Dewey
John Dewey
Dewey's experimental method and fallibilism are the pragmatist roots of Laudan's problem-solving framework. Chapter 10's progressive rationality — conditional adoption, continuous evaluation — is recognizably Dewey applied to technology transition.
Hans Jonas
Hans Jonas
Jonas's imperative of responsibility — the ethics of technological power require special obligations toward future harm — is the ethical grounding for Chapter 6's argument that residual problems create debts that aggregate accounting cannot discharge.
Shannon Vallor
Shannon Vallor
Vallor's technological self-cultivation — the need to deliberately build the intellectual and moral capacities that technology tends to outsource — is the virtue-ethics complement to Laudan's procedural rationality in Chapter 10.
Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff's surveillance capitalism analysis identifies how behavioral data extracted from AI interactions becomes a resource that amplifies the economic fishbowl crack in Chapter 5 — the repricing problem whose full dimensions the tradition cannot see.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein's language games — meaning as use within practice, not reference to abstract objects — is the philosophical underpinning of Laudan's claim that scientific rationality is practice-relative rather than grounded in fixed correspondence.

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