PERSON
Bruno Latour
The French philosopher of science who dissolved the boundary between human agents and non-human actors, gave us actor-network theory and the concept of the mediator, and whose methodology of following the actants is the most rigorous tool available for understanding what AI actually does in the world.
When Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997, the world said: machine defeats human. Bruno Latour saw something entirely different—two heterogeneous networks of human and non-human actants in collision, neither of them purely human, neither of them purely machine. This reframing, this insistence on following the actants rather than pre-sorting the world into subjects who act and objects that are acted upon, is the core of actor-network theory, and it is the most useful analytical tool available for understanding what happens when
large language models enter human workflows. Born in Beaune in 1947, trained as a philosopher and anthropologist, Latour spent his career studying scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats in the field, producing the radical finding that
scientific facts are constructed through networks of human and non-human actors rather than simply discovered. His concepts—
actant,
mediator versus intermediary,
obligatory passage point,
matters of concern,
translation