AI and The Tragedy of Culture

In article on The Conversation titled “Algorithms have already taken over human decision making,” Dionysios Demetis says,



Examples abound. In law, legal analysts are gradually being replaced by artificial intelligence, meaning the successful defence or prosecution of a case can rely partly on algorithms. Software has even been allowed to predict future criminals, ultimately controlling human freedom by shaping how parole is denied or granted to prisoners. In this way, the minds of judges are being shaped by decision-making mechanisms they cannot understand because of how complex the process is and how much data it involves.

The last sentence reminded me of Georg Simmel’s concept of “the tragedy of culture.” Simmel argued that through increasing division of labor and specialization, society creates technologies and sciences that no single individual understands. Many individuals can understand small parts of what is created but no one understands the whole thing. For instance, in a highly specialized field like chemistry, no single researcher can actually understand more than a small fragment of the body of knowledge.

One danger in this context is that we might come across someone who gives the impression that he understands everything, a cult leader like Trump, and people follow him into the abyss.

Here is a concise explanation of the tragedy of culture:



When “objective culture” becomes too complex for individuals to comprehend, people specialize. Scientists and scholars specialize more and more finely, which means they “know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.”


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