Amartya Sen — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Amartya Sen — On AI. 14 entries total. Each is a deeper-dive on a person, concept, work, event, or technology that the book treats as a stepping stone for thinking through the AI revolution. Click any card to open the entry; in each entry, words colored in orange link to other Orange Pill Wiki entries, while orange-underlined words with the Wikipedia mark link to Wikipedia.
Adaptive Preferences
The mechanism by which preferences adjust to deprivation — the satisfied user who no longer values what she has lost, because the loss reshapes what she desires.
Conversion Factors
The personal, social, and environmental conditions that determine whether a resource actually translates into a capability — the analytical mechanism that reveals why identical tools produce radically different human outcomes.
Democratic Deliberation and the Speed of the Machine
The core mechanism that Sen identifies as preventing catastrophic distributional failures — free press plus political accountability — now confronting a technology that operates faster than deliberation can process.
Functionings and Capabilities
Sen's foundational distinction between what a person does or is (functioning) and what she is substantively free to do or to be (capability) — the analytical engine of capability theory.
Substantive Freedom
The real opportunity to achieve something one has reason to value — distinguished from formal freedom, which is merely the absence of prohibition.
The Capability Approach
Sen's framework that redefines human welfare as the substantive freedom to achieve functionings one has reason to value — the evaluative instrument this book applies to AI.
The Capability Set
The full range of achievable functionings from which a person is substantively free to choose — the unit of analysis that capability theory proposes as the proper measure of human welfare.
The Capability-Sensitive Framework for AI
The 2025 operational proposal by Saptasomabuddha and colleagues to evaluate AI systems by their impact on capability floors and life-plan alignment — the most developed technical application of Sen's framework to AI governance.
The Distribution Problem
The uncomfortable fact that AI's benefits and costs do not distribute evenly across the population of affected workers — a Smithian question about institutions, not a technical question about tools.
The Entitlement Approach
Sen's demonstration, developed through his analysis of the Bengal famine of 1943, that catastrophes of deprivation result not from resource scarcity but from the failure of institutional mechanisms that determine who has access to resource…
The Evaluative Space Problem
Sen's name for the dimension in which assessment is conducted — the units, the currency, the metric — and the central methodological insight that what you measure determines what you optimize and what you miss.
The Five Instrumental Freedoms
Sen's catalog of the institutional conditions that enable substantive freedom — political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security — and the map of what AI governance must build.
The Judgment Economy
The economic regime that emerges when the cost of execution approaches zero and the premium on deciding what to execute rises correspondingly — the Smithian reading of the Orange Pill moment.
