CONCEPT
Framing (Technologies of Humility)
The first of Jasanoff's four practices: asking how a problem is defined — because the frame determines what solutions are imaginable and what consequences are governable.
Framing is the deliberate examination of how a governance problem is defined — what it includes, what it excludes, and what assumptions about values and priorities the definition embeds. The dominant framing of AI governance treats it as a safety problem: preventing harmful outputs, managing algorithmic discrimination, protecting privacy, ensuring transparency. This framing is not wrong — these are genuine problems requiring genuine solutions. But the framing excludes from consideration the harms that do not arise from outputs but from AI's integration into human life: the restructuring of professional identity, the erosion of cognitive capacities, the displacement of human relationships by more-convenient machine interactions, the transformation of what it means to know something when knowledge can be borrowed rather than earned. These excluded consequences are not less real or less important; they are ungovernable within a safety frame because they are not safety problems. Humble framing asks: What are we not seeing because of how we have defined the problem?
