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Risk and Culture
The 1982 book by Mary Douglas and Wildavsky that founded the cultural theory of risk — the intellectual framework this volume extends to artificial intelligence.
Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (1982) is the canonical statement of cultural theory. Written by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky across several years of collaboration, it argued that the selection of which dangers to fear — from the many dangers any society could potentially fear — is a social process governed by cultural dynamics rather than by technical assessment of actual harm. The book was controversial on publication, particularly among environmentalists who recognized themselves in its analysis of risk selection, and remains so. Its enduring contribution is the apparatus that lets us see the AI discourse as a cultural phenomenon first, a technical one second.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central claim is that risk selection follows a pattern: societies or groups within societies elevate certain dangers as matters of public concern while ignoring others of equal or greater empirical magnitude. The pattern is not random; it follows the grid-group typology that classifies forms of social organization. An egalitarian
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