Sheila Jasanoff — On AI
This page lists every Orange Pill Wiki entry hyperlinked from Sheila Jasanoff — On AI. 24 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.
Aesthetics of the Smooth
Byung-Chul Han's diagnosis of the cultural trajectory toward frictionlessness — a smoothness that conceals the labor and struggle that gave previous work its depth.
Civic Epistemology
Jasanoff's framework for the culturally embedded ways societies produce and validate public knowledge — explaining why the US, EU, and China govern AI through incommensurable standards.
Co-Production of Knowledge and Social Order
Jasanoff's foundational thesis that scientific knowledge and social arrangements are made simultaneously — each constituting the other — dissolving the fiction that technology develops first and society responds.
Democratic Legitimacy
Authority citizens accept as binding not through coercion but through recognition that governance satisfies process conditions—electoral mandate, institutional impartiality, reflexive plurality, proximity to governed.
Framing (Technologies of Humility)
The first of Jasanoff's four practices: asking how a problem is defined — because the frame determines what solutions are imaginable and what consequences are governable.
Imagination-to-Artifact Ratio
Segal's term for the gap between what a person can conceive and what they can produce — which AI collapsed to approximately the length of a conversation, and which Gopnik's framework reveals to be an exploitation metric that leaves the exp…
Narrative as Evidence
The methodological argument — central to phronetic social science — that first-person, context-rich, value-laden accounts constitute evidence of the most consequential kind for phenomena whose essential features are context-dependent and ju…
Participatory Technology Assessment
The practice of including affected communities in evaluating and governing technologies — producing decisions that are both better informed and more legitimate than expert-only governance.
Risk versus Uncertainty
Jasanoff's foundational distinction: risk covers outcomes specifiable in advance with assignable probabilities; uncertainty covers emergent consequences no model anticipates.
Sociotechnical Imaginaries
Collectively held visions of desirable futures shaped by science and technology — not predictions but blueprints that organize action and determine what gets built.
Technologies of Humility
Jasanoff's institutional practices for governing under uncertainty — framing, vulnerability, distribution, and learning — designed to detect what prediction cannot anticipate.
The Displaced Expert
The figure in whom the thymotic crisis of the AI transition concentrates — the credentialed professional whose decades of expertise are being repriced by a technology she did not design and cannot control.
The Governance Gap
The widening structural distance between the speed of technological capability and the speed of institutional response — the defining failure mode of democratic governance in an exponential era.
The Law-Lag Narrative
The persistent fiction that technology develops autonomously and governance merely reacts — a framing Jasanoff dismantles by showing law co-produces technology from the inside.
The Silent Middle
The Orange Pill's figure for those who hold the exhilaration and the loss simultaneously—recognized here as an intuitive formulation of Heideggerian Gelassenheit.
The Twelve-Year-Old's Question
The scene at the center of the book — a child at the threshold of formal operations asking 'What am I for?' with a cognitive tool powerful enough to pose the question but not yet equipped to manage it.
Voice
The most demanding of the three responses — the exercise of complaint from inside an institution with the expectation of being heard. Requires an audience, an adequate language, and institutional capacity to convert feedback into change.
Vulnerability Analysis (Technologies of Humility)
The systematic inquiry into who is most exposed to a technology's harms — and how they differ from the populations its designers imagined.
Worker Co-Determination in the AI Transition
The institutional practice — common in Northern Europe, rare elsewhere — of giving workers voice and authority in decisions about workplace technology deployment.
Edo Segal
Serial entrepreneur and technologist whose The Orange Pill (2026) provides the phenomenological account — the confession over the Atlantic — that Pang's framework diagnoses and treats.
Sheila Jasanoff
Indian-born American scholar (b. 1944) — founder of co-production, civic epistemology, and technologies of humility — who reshaped how democracies govern science and technology.
