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How AI Fails Us
The 2021 paper by Allen, Daron Acemoglu, Kate Crawford, and E. Glen Weyl that diagnosed the dominant AI development paradigm as structurally antidemocratic and called for an alternative based on augmenting human cooperation.
The paper argues that 'actually existing AI'—the dominant paradigm of centralized, proprietary, human-replacing systems—misconstrues intelligence as autonomous rather than social and relational and tends to concentrate power, resources, and decision-making in an engineering elite. The critique is structural rather than moral: the concentration is not the product of bad intentions but the predictable outcome of a development paradigm whose assumptions about intelligence, whose investment requirements, and whose optimization targets all point toward centralization. The authors propose an alternative paradigm based on plurality—technologies that participate in and augment human creativity and cooperation rather than replacing them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The paper was written in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard and published as part of a broader project on technology and democracy. Its four co-authors represent distinct but complementary traditions. Acemoglu, the economist, brings institutional analysis of how technology choices shape distributional outcomes. Kate Crawford, the