AI & Tech

Reconstruction

In this section, Tocqueville is not describing a form of oppression that anyone would easily recognize as oppression. The despotism he imagines harms from within, gradually and gently while seeming like it is care. This oppression makes the exercise of will feel unnecessary. The most important line in the chapter that captures this is “I do not fear that in their chiefs they will find tyrants, but rather schoolmasters.” The threat is kind of like a gentle and permanent caretaker that keeps people in childhood.

Tocqueville imagines an “immense tutelary power” that is “absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild.” It provides for citizens’ security, foresees their needs, etc. Then he asks: “can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?" The phrase, “pain of living” is important here. Tocqueville is saying that power offers relief from the difficulty of genuine self direction and that people will choose it. He’s saying that unlike the old despotism that was imposed, this one will be welcomed.

The process is gradual, which makes it dangerous. The protector power “renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen.” He argues that it's dangerous because it's not coercive. At each individual step, accepting assistance makes sense because it's easier and faster. The problem is what thousands of these small steps do over time. The result Tocqueville imagines is "a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” They are still busy and still productive but just no longer choosing for themselves.

Here is where Essays 1 and 2 feed directly into Essay 3. Tocqueville says "equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit." The restlessness from Essay 1 means people are constantly in motion and will accept anything that reduces friction. The conformity from Essay 2 means that once the majority adopts a belief, opting out becomes socially strange. Nobody forces this despotism on anyone. The psychology that equality produces is the psychology that would choose it freely.

He then describes how democracy plays into this. People elect their caretakers and then "console themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters." The formal exercise of sovereignty doesn’t mean there's no dependence. You feel free because you selected the arrangement. But Tocqueville says, "The nature of the master is much less important to me than the obedience." This is where the cycle closes. Depending on something makes you lose the ability to judge if choosing to depend was a good idea.

Evaluation

The extent to which this chapter predicted the future is scary. You could replace “tutelary power” with many specific technologies and the passage still makes sense. "Provides for their security" is fraud detection and two-factor authentication. "Foresees and secures their needs" is Amazon's predictive shipping and Netflix's recommendation engine. There are many examples for this, but that’s the general point. The fit is very close here and it needs to be taken seriously.

The strongest challenge to Tocqueville here is that tools have always extended human capacity. The calculator took away the trouble of arithmetic. GPS took away the trouble of navigation. Neither seems to have destroyed human agency. So why should AI be different? I think the difference lies in what kind of capacity is being replaced. GPS replaced navigation, which is mechanical. What I mean by that is that you don’t think better because you can read a physical map. But if AI replaces judgment itself, the ability to form a position or evaluate an argument on your own, that’s wildly different. The question Tocqueville raises is the right one: is AI more like a GPS, freeing your attention? Or is it also directing what you do with that freed attention? I think it's the second one.

Also, Tocqueville was worried about the state, but the version of his threat today could be coming from private companies. Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are "absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild" in exactly the way he describes.

Application

On whether soft despotism has gained ground politically, I think the honest answer is yes, but not in the way you would think. The growth of administrative government (health systems, regulatory agencies, social insurance programs) has taken over huge portions of life that people once did themselves. These systems have benefits, and I'm not arguing against them. What’s interesting to think about is asking whether these types of programs have reduced the habits of civic self-direction that Tocqueville thought were vital.

The technology question is where this is most relevant to my own life. It's strange that I used AI to help prepare for an assignment that includes a section on Tocqueville's warnings about AI. Jonathan explicitly encouraged that, and I don't think using AI for preparation is the problem Tocqueville is pointing at. The real test is whether you are able to think about something without reading what Claude said about it first. I think that’s what Tocqueville would have been worried about.

There are connections between these and the previous essays. It connects to Essay 1 because AI removes friction and restlessness. It connects to Essay 2 because once everyone starts using AI for a task, not using it starts to feel weird. Also, the practical orientation in Essay 2 means that people think about whether or not AI tools work instead of thinking about what they are doing to long term capacity.