CONCEPT
Plurality Paradigm
The alternative to centralized AI development proposed by Allen, Weyl, Audrey Tang, and collaborators—an approach that treats intelligence as social and relational and designs technology to augment human cooperation rather than replace it.
The plurality paradigm emerged from the argument of 'How AI Fails Us' and has been developed institutionally through Allen's GETTING-Plurality network, Weyl's RadicalxChange foundation, and Tang's work on digital democracy in Taiwan. The paradigm is built on three structural commitments. First, intelligence is plural rather than singular—emerging from the interaction of diverse participants rather than from the centralized optimization of a single system. Second, technology should augment human cooperation rather than replace human cognitive labor. Third, the development and governance of AI should distribute authority broadly rather than concentrate it in a small number of organizations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The plurality paradigm stands in direct opposition to the dominant paradigm of contemporary AI development, which Allen's coauthors have called 'actually existing AI.' The dominant paradigm is characterized by massive centralization: a small number of corporations deploy enormous computational resources to train ever-larger models that are optimized to replace human cognitive labor across an expanding range