CONCEPT
Artificial Power
Mark Coeckelbergh’s reframing of AI from a technology of cognition to a technology of power—a shift that relocates the governing question from can it think? to who rules? and the governing discipline from cognitive science to political philosophy.
The phrase “artificial intelligence” is,
Coeckelbergh argues in his 2022
Political Philosophy of AI, a flattering euphemism for something that older and harder words describe better. The most consequential AI systems in the world are not lonely minds contemplating the universe. They are instruments of decision—about who gets hired, who receives a loan, who gets policed, who gets seen and who gets heard. Every one of these is a question about the allocation of advantage and disadvantage, which is to say a political question. Technology, he observes, “has all these effects, non-intended effects, and they’re political because they change the way we live together.” The politics is not an add-on to the AI story; it is the substance. When we call these systems intelligent, we frame them as cognitive achievements and ask cognitive questions: how do they process language, what are their capabilities, what are their limitations? When we call them powerful, we frame them as political