PERSON
James C. Scott
American political scientist (1936–2024), Sterling Professor at Yale, whose work on peasant politics, state power, and resistance produced the single most influential framework for diagnosing the failures of comprehensive planning — and the framework this volume applies to the AI transition.
James C. Scott was an American political scientist and anthropologist whose four-decade career at Yale produced a body of work that reshaped how scholars and practitioners understand the relationship between institutional power, local knowledge, and the unintended consequences of top-down planning. Trained as a political scientist, Scott became essentially an anthropologist through his decades of fieldwork in Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, Burma, and the upland regions that came to be known as Zomia. His major works — The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985), Seeing Like a State (1998), The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012) — produced a distinctive body of theory whose core concepts have traveled far beyond political science into technology criticism, organizational theory, urban planning, and development policy. Scott died in July 2024, months before the AI transition his frameworks so precisely illuminate.
