PERSON
Mark Coeckelbergh
The Belgian philosopher of technology who reframed artificial intelligence as artificial power—insisting that the right discipline for analysing AI is not cognitive science or even ethics but political philosophy, and that the question of who rules is the only question that finally matters.
Mark Coeckelbergh has built his career on refusing the question that everyone else rushes to answer. The dominant framing of AI asks whether the machine can think. Coeckelbergh asks what the machine already does: to whom it grants advantage, whose voice it silences, which decisions it makes inscrutable, how it reshapes the people who use it long before it does anything that deserves the name intelligence. He is Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology at the University of Vienna, and his many books—AI Ethics (2020), The Political Philosophy of AI (2022), Self-Improvement (2022), and Why AI Undermines Democracy and What To Do About It (2024)—trace a consistent argument from ethics to language to power to democracy. His signature move is the relational turn: moral status is not a property buried inside an entity, waiting to be measured, but something that emerges between entities, in how they stand toward each other.
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