Anthony Giddens

Anthony Giddens is the theorist of the self in late modernity. Across a career that ran from the London School of Economics to Cambridge to the House of Lords, he developed the foundational proposition that in conditions of modernity the self is not a fixed entity but an ongoing narrative project, continuously constructed, maintained, and revised in response to changing circumstances—and that the maintenance of this project depends on what he called ontological security: the mostly unconscious confidence that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, and that the basic parameters of self and identity remain stable through time. The AI transition has tested this proposition with a severity that no previous technological disruption has matched, because it does not merely change what people do but attacks the routines through which professional identity has been constituted—the daily practice of coding, writing, designing, analyzing, teaching.