A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives..- James Madison, 1820
There are certain points in human history where we have discovered a lot only to discover there’s a lot more to discover. Thinkers sensed that massive change was coming but did not understand the shape it would take.
One of these periods was the late 18th century. Science was on a much firmer foundation after Newtonian physics had taken over. Hints of the Industrial Revolution were out there but no one knew how it would reshape their worlds over the next century.
It was into this interregnum that philosophers like Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Condorcet stepped in. They sought to establish principles for both society and science going forward.
We are at one of those moments again. We have unlocked the power of computing and are poised on the edge of the age of AI. But our cultures and systems are still stuck in an industrial mindset.
Humanity has had far less time to adapt to this shift than the thinkers of the late 18th Century. Their shift took over a century and even then things were spinning out of control for them. Condorcet did some of his most important work while on the run from the French Revolution.
Their insights still ring today even though many were lost in the Industrial Revolution and its counter revolutions throughout the last century. Since World War II we have increasingly questioned these constructed realities. This has only accelerated over the last 30 years. Kant and Condorcet also existed in a world where humanity increasingly questioned familiar forms of legitimacy and truth.
The painful process of establishing and holding the legitimacy of the people over their governments would convulse human history for two centuries. Reason never fully triumphed over superstition. The organization of capitalist economies established new hierarchies of power under the guise of democratic access to wealth.
The information revolution gradually undermined the weak foundations established in the latter half of the 20th Century by making Reason hard to discern through informational noise, leading to a resurgence of superstitious thought.
Now, we are confronted with a new set of challenges, driven by that very democratization of information coupled with new tools, like AI Large Language Models, to sift through and distort them.
Kant and Condorcet summarized the development of Enlightenment thinking and these can be boiled down into three distinct principles, all of which should resonate with us today.
- Reason is the foundation of legitimacy (both politically and intellectually)
- Progress and perfectibility (both intellectually and morally) should be fundamental human goals
- Universal moral and legal norms (no one is above the law) are required to achieve the first two principles
In the current atmosphere of political, economic, and intellectual turmoil, these principles provide a map toward positive outcomes. AI gives all of us far more influence over our systems than ever before. However, this is only possible if we are prepared to seize it before it is imposed on us by the existing hierarchical orders. In other words, just as technology arguably undermined the original Enlightenment, now it can be used to liberate us from the shackles of industrial thinking.
Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. – Immanuel Kant, On History, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 3
AI only presents a threat to those who can’t (or won’t) reason. For those of us that do, it is a tremendous tool for amplifying our reasoning powers. AI does this by cutting through the vast seas of information that blind us to what’s actually happening. If you can’t see, you can’t reason.
Most of the critiques of AI seem to center on our propensity to give up our reason to it. My students, who have poor reasoning skills, lean on it heavily to reason for them. A frequent “critique” of AI centers on a series of cautionary tales (e.g., legal briefs citing nonexistent cases, consulting reports written by AI tools). These kinds of examples are not a sign of AI’s “intelligence” or “danger,” but instead signal our abdication of reason.
Our ability to reason is dulled by centuries of industrial thinking. The vast majority of workers were not expected to reason. Indeed, they were discouraged from it because it had the potential to interfere with the operation of the machines.
The real tragedy came when we started basing our educational processes on production rather than Reason. We have produced generations of dependent thinkers who can, at best, reason their way through the task in front of them but fail to see the larger process it’s a part of. That part has been “educated” out of them, because it was seen as unnecessary (and potentially disruptive).
In my classes I use AI as a reasoning tool. I teach my students how to use AI to generate questions rather than simply providing them with answers. We use the SIFT Method from Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg to analyze not only sources from the internet, but also the responses of the AI itself.
This supports their reasoning abilities because it introduces them to a powerful tool to compare and explore open-ended questions. This is something that traditional schooling often deprecates because it’s too hard to assess.
As a teacher, I can focus on teaching them how to navigate the processes of reasoning and navigating the complex information environment they face. I don’t have to spend nearly as much time doing the nuts and bolts. Instead, I can use AI to create reasoning exercises on the fly. I am not dependent on a test bank of questions that demand answers.
In my research I use it to explore knowledge more efficiently. One method is to use Notebook LM as what I call an “idea extraction machine.” I’ve been building customized libraries for everything from coding to assessment to technology.
Using these libraries, I no longer have to depend on fragmentary notes. I can scan, and more importantly, compare entire books at a keystroke. This also lets me evaluate what sources I want to spend extra time with to really get their complex points.
Augmenting our exploration of Reason is a primary facet of Douglas Engelbart’s plea for “augmenting human intellect” or, as Howard Rheingold puts it, they are “tools for thought.” We just need to use them that way. It’s fun to imagine what Kant might have done with a reasoning tool like Notebook LM.
A central challenge of our age is the sheer amount of information we have to confront. If we are constantly just “keeping up” that leaves little time for reasoning.
Tools that help me and my students efficiently find the needles that we need in the haystacks of information we are confronted with are invaluable. They are necessary to open the space for reasoning and to find the legitimate knowledge that is out there instead of depending on interpreters and charlatans to do it for us.
Establishing the legitimacy of our reasoning, as Enlightenment principles demand, never vanished. Instead, it was overwhelmed by our growing ability to produce narrative noise, from the steam press to radio, television, and modern databases. As Marshall McLuhan observed, 20th century technologies dulled rather than amplified our capacity to think – until the computer.
We didn’t lose Reason; we lacked the tools to make it heard above the din. AI has given us those tools. We just need to demand that they be designed to augment Reason, not further blind us to it.
Such is the object of the work I have undertaken; the result of which will be to show, from reasoning and from facts, that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us. The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde; at least while the earth retains its situation in the system of the universe, and the laws of this system shall neither effect upon the globe a general overthrow, nor introduce such changes as would no longer permit the human race to preserve and exercise therein the same faculties, and find the same resources. – Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas. Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind. Trans. M. Carey, 1795, p. 12.
If Reason grants legitimacy to our thoughts and actions, progress gives them direction. As economic progress stalled for most of us, we lost faith in ourselves because progress was tied to wealth.
However, Condorcet was not talking about economic progress. That was a capitalist invention. The Marquis was talking about our ability to learn and grow as humans, not as consumers.
The Industrial Age conflated progress with economics. However, unlimited economic growth is no longer possible due to climate change. As we stagnate, machines take over many industrial tasks (including office-bound assembly lines). Extremist movements (like those that Condorcet was hiding from in 1794) thrive in this kind of uncertainty. We’ve lost track of what progress means.
Our uncertainty is a product of shifting paradigms. We have spent the last 30 years trying to figure out how the world was going to relate to itself politically and economically and longer than that figuring out how humans should relate to their machines.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment may not have always lived up to their ideals (see Madison and Jefferson, the slave owners), but they did break the mold when it came to clarity of thought. They marked a unique moment in human history where we broke away from superstition.
With misinformation and fake news providing today’s superstition and AI demanding a level of rationality that most find difficult, we are once again at a crossroads.
If we look to AI as some sort of God, then we have succumbed to superstition. If, on the other hand, we look to AI as a partner to our rationality we can reach heights of human progress only dreamt of in science fiction stories.
The power we are “giving” to AI is the central question that drives much of the current debate over its threat. Those that seek to elevate it to godhood are both the naysayers and hucksters of the debate. Those of us that see it as a reasoning tool are a small minority caught in the middle.
A lot of this uncertainty is driven by our inability to gain perspective on the daily deluge of information which pretty much everyone has to confront.
18th century Europe was also confronting a confusing and bewildering change. They were loosening their bonds with religion. Technical revolutions were starting to shift relationships between people and work.
Societies were struggling with how to organize themselves internally and at the end of the century revolutionary France and secession of the American colonies put the alien concept of government’s responsibility to the people firmly on the table leading to decades of warfare.
Enlightenment thinkers, however, realized that the quest for human perfection required collective action. They got this from a century of experience in a society of letters, which focused discussion between thinkers seeking to perfect their own thinking.
We have lost hope that this is possible. Faith in our educational systems is at an all-time low. Part of the problem is that so many of our educational processes have conflated progressive human improvement with economic improvement. AI presents a fundamental threat to that logic.
The imperative here is human improvement, not technical improvement. This is another tenet that the Industrial Revolution reversed. As we became fascinated with our machines, we became part of them.
In the process, we lost sight of what Doug Engelbart wrote should be the primary task of those machines: augmenting human intellect. Instead, we augmented our machines with humans.
We can design AI to follow this trend or undermine it. Digital technologies have lowered the barrier to human improvement, even as we failed to grasp them. This is a central theme of my book, Discovering Digital Humanity.
We must make a conscious choice to break with that trend. This means fundamentally reimagining our systems of learning and work in the face of the new realities that AI confronts us with.
News reports indicate that the loss of entry-level jobs across many industries is real. That is because the purpose of these jobs was to indoctrinate those college graduates into the systems of an organization and its technology. In other words, they were being trained to become part of the machine.
Machines are by definition better at being machines. Humans need to lean into being human.
I have spent my technological career fighting against this trend. Specifically, I have no patience for technologies in education that interfere with the learning process. I’ve created everything from physical spaces to online spaces designed to flex for the needs of the humans using them.
AI increases that flexibility considerably. As a teacher, I can pivot on the fly to meet the needs of any given class whereas before that was very difficult to do logistically.
I never seemed to have enough time to create and test classroom activities to meet the specific needs of a particular group of students. With AI assistance, I am now able to do this much faster and that brings with it a humanizing benefit because I can be that much more responsive to the human needs and variability of my classes.
My focus in teaching has always been to make my students better humans, not better machines. I stress using AI tools to overcome many of the barriers to their success. Research and writing that are often intimidating barriers to my students. Struggling with the mechanics of writing keeps them from engaging in deeper reasoning. Rote repetition is for machines, not humans.
My goal has always been to make the next generation capable thinkers because the world is increasingly unkind to those who can’t reason. AI doesn’t reason, but it can help us to reason.
This is the moral imperative that Condorcet lays before us with this principle. I may not transform them with my classes alone but I can light a fire of questioning that will take them down their own paths to reasoning. Not all of them will make it but more of them will than would be the case without my intervention. Reasoning tools like AI make this imperative task easier.
For if the law is such that a whole people could not possibly agree to it (for examples, if it stated that a certain class of subjects must be privileged as a hereditary ruling class), it is unjust. – Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 1795), in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 79.
In the Enlightenment mind, progress was impossible without a level of equality before the law. At first, this centered on political equality, as professed in the US Declaration of Independence or the bloody leveling of the early years of the French Revolution. The real threat to this principle, however, was economic inequality brought on by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.
The seismic shifts of the 18th century led to two disconnected responses. At the popular and political level societies (eventually) demanded order from chaos. But at the scientific and technical level change was driven by rational inquiry, which tolerated uncertainty.
Sometimes these two intersected such as in the United States Constitution but more often they were at odds such as during the French Revolution. The Industrial Revolution cemented this tension between capitalism and democracy by elevating “inequality” as the “price of progress.” “Progress” is therefore driven by the extrinsic motivator of wealth, not the intrinsic motivator of personal and societal growth.
What both the Americans and the French realized fairly quickly was that actually making democratic institutions work was far different from envisioning their rational functionality. America descended into partisan bickering within a decade of the ratification of the Constitution. Within 75 years this partisan bickering would descend into civil war. In France, the chaos opened the door for a strong man who plunged Europe into war for the next 20 years.
Reading the United States Constitution and Madison, Hamilton, and Jay’s defense of it demonstrates what Enlightenment thinkers thought was possible in the political sphere. Their dissection of human foibles and systems was unprecedented. They built on a century of philosophical thought that gave them the ability to envision a world originally conceived of by philosophers like John Locke, Rousseau, and the Baron de Montesquieu.
Thinkers like Madison, however, had to apply them to an unequal society. They did this through deep inquiry and critical thinking. Some things appear deceptively simple like factions. The implications are this, however, are complex, as Madison explores in Federalist 10.
These leaders were facing uncharted territory. No one had ever done this before but they felt an urgency to make it work. If George Washington had been more like Napoleon, we could have very easily degenerated into a French outcome.
The mechanics of economics were largely a mystery and technologies were already starting to reshape the world in Britain. That is why the Constitution is such a flexible document that is still with us today even with all of its flaws.
We face a similar pivot today. The turn of the 21st century saw a brief flourishing of widespread democracy underpinned by capitalist economics. Both were rooted in Enlightenment concepts but mutated by the intervening Industrial Age into pale shadows of their ideals.
The ideals expressed in the US Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizenare difficult, if not impossible, ideals in a society that is economically unequal. We can profess that no man is above the law but time and again men have put themselves over it because they had access to resources that others did not.
This is not a plea for communism. Its historical tenet was to bring everybody down to an average. This is no longer necessary. We have the technological capacity to bring everyone up without significantly pulling our societies down.
I have always looked at digital technology as a democratizing force. As it has grown more powerful people have access to information and resources previously unimaginable. There is a supercomputer on my belt, and I am talking into it right now.
Before AI this technology was relatively inaccessible. You had to have certain skills (like coding or the mastery of complex programs) in order to create even with digital technology.
As I described in a series of blogs earlier this year, we are entering into a world where the limits on your creativity are just that, your creativity. Technology is increasingly not the bottleneck. Patterns of thought are.
This is why patterns of thought are what I teach students of all ages. Teachers are limited by this as much as their students, if not more. Private industry is struggling to manage this transition not because it threatens their profits, but because it upsets the systems they’re used to in achieving their profits.
The key to equality before the law is human improvement. Madison put it succinctly when he wrote in 1820 that, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
You cannot be equal before the law in a hierarchical society. We have transformed from a hierarchy based on kinship to one based on wealth. Knowledge hierarchies have existed uneasily beside these, but now technology gives my students, most of whom have never had the benefit of a first class education, a fighting chance to climb that hierarchy in order to achieve the level of Reason and equality demanded of us by Kant.
These principles are intertwined with one another. You cannot have equality before the law if you do not prioritize the improvement of the human condition. You cannot improve the human condition without fostering Reason. In an age where many people were still struggling to meet the basic needs of human survival, these goals seemed distant.
However, creativity and knowledge exist in tension with capitalist hierarchy. Capitalism is dependent on inequality. Profit motive demands that some achieve success while others pay for that success. The argument, of course, is that the rising tide will lift all boats. This has been largely true but stagnated over the last 50 years.
Today, there are real questions about whether capitalism can survive the end of scarcity and the emergence of tools like AI that will replace traditional workers. Democracy is under threat across the globe as chaos replaces uncertainty.
But we can learn from the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers. The execution of democracy is what is flawed. Its underlying Enlightenment principles remain, and even the most authoritarian dictators are forced to give it lip service.
The thing we have lost and need to rediscover is a process of deep, rational inquiry. This permeates through all of the Federalist Papers and from the discussions of the convention itself. This was their truly radical idea. The areas where the Constitution failed (like in dealing with slavery) was when the delegates gave up on rationality in favor of pragmatism.
AI can be a powerful tool for fostering rationality but we have to know when to discard pragmatism to achieve our potential with it. If we use it to replicate the broken processes of the near past, we are asking for failure (or worse).
We should be looking to AI to give us better questions to ask of ourselves, not rely on it for answers. We can use these questions to achieve human progress and redesign our systems to adapt them to the realities of our chaotic world.
By widening the circle of Reason, AI can augment human progress and help us survive our present chaos or it can stifle human progress by bolstering repressive institutions that serve themselves, not the humans they were designed for. This is our choice. The Enlightenment was never a moment; it was a pattern of thought. We need to follow it now more than ever.
