Civilizing AI: Common Sense and Abstraction in a Mechanised Society
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Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’s call to civilize modernity, I asked what it would mean to civilize AI and the abstractions it produces. I brought Whitehead’s account of civilization as transmission that preserves freedom for successors into dialogue with Lewis Mumford’s critique of the megamachine, focusing on the abstractions that govern contemporary LLM architectures.