AI is changing what we can do. Who we become is still our choice
Hacker News•July 22, 2026•10 min read•2 views
LINKS Visit Microsoft AI Accessibility Mode LATEST The architect as humanist builder: why AI can’t replace craft AI is changing what we can do. Who we become is still our choice To understand AI’s effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their choices.
Technologies that extend human powers may also, by degrees, erode the faculties they are meant to assist. Physicians who use AI to help detect adenomas during colonoscopies may become less adept at spotting anomalies on their own. They start to lose a skill. Yet if AI is always available, what really matters, surely, is whether doctors using AI do better than doctors did before AI arrived. And, in a range of cases, it seems that they do. [1]
New technologies often change the skills a job requires. The grizzled mechanic who could diagnose your old jalopy by ear had a valuable expertise, but that expertise lost value once computers began interpreting the data produced by modern vehicles. So, you might think that we should care only about whether the combination of human beings and technology leads to better results, even when that combination attenuates human skills.
More than a century and a half ago, John Stuart Mill argued that this view was incomplete. In On Liberty, published in 1859, he wrote:
It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown, battles fought, causes tried and even churches erected and prayers said, by machinery—by automatons in human form—it would be a considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world, and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and will produce. [2]
For Mill, what people do may, in some cases, matter less than “what manner of men” they become in doing it. The route by which we arrive somewhere can shape us, and that shaping may itself be part of what matters. That’s because Mill espoused a broader ideal in which autonomy, individuality and the active cultivation of one’s faculties are constituents of a good human life, not merely useful tools for achieving it. A technology that alters how we think, judge, attend or feel may leave us diminished even when it improves performance.
Mill could not have had large language models in mind, of course. But he did imagine a world in which machines “fight battles” and “try causes”, a prospect that now sounds strikingly contemporary. In such a world, human beings would turn over not only labor but decision-making. We would no longer be shaped by doing difficult things and by making consequential decisions. That, Mill says with characteristic restraint, would be a “considerable loss.”
This concern had personal resonance for him. Mill had been subjected to one of the most rigorous educations in modern history. Raised by his father, political economist James Mill, under the influence of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, he was drilled from childhood in Greek, Latin, logic, history, political economy and philosophy. He became a savant, but he also came to fear that the process had made him mechanical, a kind of reasoning machine rather than a fully developed person. His account of a mental breakdown he experienced at the age of 20 suggests that he had been trained to think and perform, but not to feel or choose freely. When he later warned against reducing human beings to “automatons”, he was referring to a prospect that had long weighed on him.
Mill was one of the most formidable thinkers in Victorian Britain. He wrote major works on democracy, logic, political economy, utilitarianism and ethics. He kept up with the science of his day, served in parliament, and, as Bertrand Russell later remarked, “combined intellectual distinction with a very admirable character.” [3] Yet he always remained alert to the possibility that efficiency can come at the cost of humanity. By our lights, he got many things right and some things wrong. Was he right in his criticism of automata?
Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense, is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.
How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.
Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest, your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your own.
I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers. You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise. Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer, because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own, admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of the universal moral truths.
That moral deference is inconsistent with autonomy does not mean we should resist taking advice, even from an automaton. We always have. We turn to friends and family, to churches, mosques and synagogues, to newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and now to platforms, from Reddit to TikTok to Substack. It’s just that, as with those other sources of guidance, two things can go wrong when you ask an LLM.
First, the people who run an AI chatbot could slant it, steering you in one direction without your knowing it. That threatens your autonomy because it is a form of manipulation. If someone draws your attention only to arguments on one side, even if it is the side you were already inclined to take, they have not enriched your thinking, which is what advisers are for. Your aim should be to make the best choice in light of what you take to be the right values and a realistic understanding of your situation. You want, in short, to be guided by what, on reflection, you would judge to be the right reasons. Someone, or something, that distracts you from relevant arguments or facts, or misleads you about the situation, makes that less likely.
Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say accordingly.
But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they “know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves. [4]
First, academic scholarship and theory in the North Atlantic has, in recent decades, and during a period of immense productivity in articles, books and blog posts, been dominated by a broadly liberal tradition. That tradition places special weight on democracy and equality, values that are less central in conservative traditions. So, across the texts on which the models are pretrained, the balance of moral argument about politics is likely to fall somewhat left of center.
Second, post-training and fine-tuning are shaped in part by people with relatively high levels of formal education, and that population now sits, on average, to the left of the general population. To be sure, alongside what the economist Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin Left, there is also a Merchant Right, and the senior management of the companies that own these LLMs includes people whose wealth makes that tendency more likely. [5] Still, the norms embedded in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) are likely to reflect the outlook of highly educated evaluators more than those of the population at large.
It is true, as well, that the corporate world of AI is made up of a multinational motley of individuals. It would not be surprising, then, if they were less prone to nationalist leanings than the typical person in the countries they come from. Migration encourages cosmopolitanism, and cosmopolitanism enables migration, in a cycle of mutual reinforcement. The larger point is that these systems are bound to carry, albeit incompletely and opaquely, the assumptions of the social worlds that made them. Our thinking may be distorted even when no one is trying to manipulate us.
Discussion of these issues requires care in thinking about bias. Bias, in the relevant sense, involves what the philosopher Thomas Kelly calls “a systematic departure from a norm or standard of correctness.” [6] Suppose some current conservative politics rests on a picture of the world that conflicts with the best available evidence, say, about climate change or vaccine efficacy. [7] Then LLMs would tilt left because that is where the evidence points, and it would be odd to call a tendency toward truth a bias.
But there are also plenty of factual questions on which the Brahmin Left has interests of its own
Hacker NewsJuly 22, 202610 min read2 views