PERSON
John Stuart Mill
The Victorian philosopher of liberty who gave us the clearest instrument for judging whether a powerful system enlarges or diminishes the human capacity to think, to differ, and to author a life of one's own—and who foresaw the shape of AI's deepest temptation before any machine could produce it.
John Stuart Mill is the wrong philosopher to summon if you want comfort about artificial intelligence, and the right one if you want clarity. He wrote in the smoke of industrial England, on questions of speech and conscience and the slow tyranny of public opinion, and he wrote with such precision about the mechanics of human freedom that his arguments survive translation into machinery he could never have imagined. When we ask today who decides what a billion people are allowed to read, or what an optimizing system should be permitted to do to a human mind, we are asking Mill's questions in a new vocabulary. His
On Liberty supplies the architecture: the harm principle, the defense of unpopular opinion, the warning against the
tyranny of the majority, the insistence on individuality. His
Utilitarianism supplies the engine and its crucial complication: the distinction between higher