CONCEPT
Manufactured Risk
Risks produced by the very institutions designed to manage uncertainty — the distinctive category of danger characteristic of the risk society, and the framework within which AI's most serious threats become analytically tractable.
Manufactured risks are risks whose origin lies in human decisions rather than natural hazards — nuclear accidents, climate change, financial crises, pandemic mismanagement, and now the distinctive risks of artificial intelligence. Giddens, working alongside Ulrich Beck, identified manufactured risk as the distinctive danger of late modernity: the institutions designed to reduce uncertainty about the natural world have generated new uncertainties about the human and technological world, and these uncertainties routinely exceed the institutional capacity to manage them. AI represents manufactured risk in its paradigmatic contemporary form.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept was developed in the mid-1990s collaboration between Giddens and Beck on risk society theory. It emerged from the recognition that twentieth-century dangers differed structurally from those of pre-modern societies: they were produced by human institutions rather than encountered as natural hazards, they operated on timescales and spatial scales that challenged existing governance mechanisms, and their management required the very institutions whose operations had produced them.
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