PERSON
Martha Nussbaum
The philosopher who recovered from the Greek tragedians the insight that the things we value most are valuable precisely because they are vulnerable—and who thereby supplied the AI age with its most precise instrument for holding the genuine gain and the genuine loss of the transition simultaneously, without flinching from either.
Martha Nussbaum is the philosopher of tragic awareness. Her career-spanning argument—from the 1986 masterwork
The Fragility of Goodness through the capabilities approach she developed with Amartya Sen to the theory of political emotions—rests on a single, devastating insight: the attempt to make the good life invulnerable to luck, contingency, and the disruption of external circumstances succeeds only by eliminating the very goods it was designed to protect. The engineer who retreats to the woods to preserve her expertise from the market that no longer values it has achieved the
Platonic invulnerability that Nussbaum spent her career diagnosing as a philosophical error: the invulnerability of stasis, of a practice preserved in amber, admirable perhaps but no longer alive.
[YOU] on AI reaches for tragic awareness when its author describes the compound feeling he experienced in Trivandrum—watching twenty engineers discover that each could now do what