CONCEPT
Distance from Consequences
The first of Glover's three erosion mechanisms: the separation — physical, psychological, or conceptual — between the agent and the person harmed, which suppresses the human response and makes cruelty psychologically tractable.
Every technology of mediation in the history of human production has altered the distance between agent and affected person, and every alteration in distance has produced a corresponding alteration in the agent's moral experience. The longbow increased the distance between archer and target. The factory increased the distance between owner and worker. The bureaucracy increased the distance between decision-maker and person decided about. In each case, the increase in distance produced a decrease in the involuntary recognition of shared humanity that makes harm difficult. Distance kills sympathy. This is not metaphor. It is psychological observation, replicated across contexts from combat trauma to organizational behavior. AI introduces a new species of distance — functional distance, the separation between intention and consequence mediated by a tool that handles the implementation — and the new species is consequential because implementation is where the downstream becomes concrete.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Distance operates in multiple registers. Physical distance — the bomber