CONCEPT
Visibility Structures
Juma's term for the institutional mechanisms that make transition costs visible to decision-makers — structural remedies for the structural blindness of winners to losers.
Visibility structures are institutional arrangements that create direct, sustained connections between people who benefit from a transition and people who bear its costs, so the costs become as vivid, as personal, and as immediate as the benefits. They are not surveys or sentiment dashboards. They are relational mechanisms operating at the level of institutional design rather than individual virtue. The historical precedent is the labor inspection system developed in nineteenth-century Britain — inspectors sent into factories to observe and report conditions, creating the visibility that made the Factory Acts politically possible. The AI transition requires analogous structures adapted to a displacement that is cognitive, professional, and existential rather than physical.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The nineteenth-century factory inspection system was, in essence, a visibility structure. Before the inspectors, suffering was invisible: factory owners did not see it because their attention was oriented toward output rather than conditions, and the public did not see it because factories were closed environments whose internal reality was shielded from external observation.