What’s old is new: AI and bureaucracy

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2024

Abstract

The ability of artificial intelligence technology to do things beyond human capability is its appeal, but this ability potentially puts AI beyond human understanding and control. This chapter explores how such a monstrous form of social action arose by proposing that AI is functionally similar and coextensive with bureaucracy and operations research and management. Bureaucracy is the organizational condition beneath the rise of AI not because AI liberates society from bureaucracy, but because it perfects bureaucracy and deepens our social and collective commitment to it. The actual role of AI is further dehumanization and, thus, to perfect bureaucracy. The result is a high degree of skepticism that AI can be put under any meaningful degree of human control that might be called ‘regulation’ since it is the perfection of the regulatory social principle. Moreover, hope placed in democratization is misplaced because of the established dependence of mass democracy on bureaucracy.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Handbook on Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence

First Page

53

Last Page

65

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS