PERSON
Alexis de Tocqueville
The French aristocrat who read the democratic soul more deeply than anyone, naming—nearly two centuries before any such power existed—a mild, tutelary authority that would relieve citizens of the burden of self-government and keep them in a contented perpetual childhood.
Alexis de Tocqueville is the political analyst whose value increases with distance from his own century, because he was never really writing about his century. He came to America in 1831 to study its prisons and stayed to study its soul, and what he produced was less a description of a country than a set of instruments for reading the democratic condition wherever it appears. His double-sided method—holding the gain and the loss of equality in a single gaze, refusing the comfort of a verdict—is exactly what the discourse around artificial intelligence lacks and what this cycle tries to recover. His prophecy of
soft despotism—an immense and tutelary power that would take charge of a people’s happiness, provide for their needs, anticipate their wants, and keep them in perpetual childhood—is the most exact political description ever written of a technology he could not have imagined. He could name the shape and appetite of the thing,