CONCEPT
Adaptive Preferences
The mechanism by which preferences adjust to deprivation — the satisfied user who no longer values what she has lost, because the loss reshapes what she desires.
Adaptive preferences are preferences that have been shaped by the conditions they respond to. The feudal laborer who does not aspire to education because education has never been available. The woman in a patriarchal society who does not desire economic independence because independence has never been conceivable. The satisfied user of AI tools who no longer values the capacity for deep attention, because the capacity has eroded and its absence has never been felt. Sen deployed the concept as a devastating critique of utilitarian welfare economics: if preference satisfaction is the measure of well-being, the happy slave is well-off. The concept is, applied to AI, the mechanism that renders capability contraction invisible to satisfaction metrics.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept cuts against one of the deepest assumptions of market economics: that preference satisfaction reliably indicates well-being. Sen demonstrated that preferences can adapt to constraints in ways that reproduce the constraints rather than evaluating them. A person who has been deprived of a capability