Over a century ago, journalist and social theorist Walter Lippmann proposed a radical solution to democratic ignorance. Because the modern world was too vast for anyone to understand through firsthand experience, Lippmann argued, societies needed institutionalized "intelligence bureaus" - bodies that would deploy scientific methods to assemble facts and explain them to citizens and policymakers. It was an elitist vision, one that sought to put "the public in its place" so that each person "may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."
As "Hvylya" reports, citing philosopher Dan Williams' essay on Conspicuous Cognition, that vision is now being realized "in a form he could never have imagined" - through commercial AI chatbots built by Silicon Valley companies chasing profits, not pursuing any technocratic ideal.
Williams traces how the post-World War II Western order partly followed Lippmann's blueprint. The expansion of civil services, growth of science agencies, and professionalization of journalism created what scholars describe as "increasingly rationalized and formalized solutions to the problem of how societies made up of diverse populations with diverse and conflicting political views can nonetheless form a shared sense of what is going on in the world." It was, in Williams' assessment, "a golden age of technocracy - with all the problems and pathologies that all-too-human technocrats bring."
Social media shattered that arrangement by democratizing access to media and amplifying voices the establishment had suppressed. LLMs, Williams argues, are now restoring the technocratic balance - but with key advantages over human experts. Unlike Lippmann's human intelligence bureaus, LLMs can "rapidly deploy encyclopaedic knowledge to answer people's idiosyncratic questions," engage patiently with skepticism, and deliver expert opinion without condescension or status threats.
Williams is clear-eyed about the risks. Expert opinion is "often biased and wrong," and the converging, technocratizing character of LLMs "might reduce epistemic diversity in broader society." Lippmann's original vision had the same flaw - a naive faith that experts could be trusted to serve the public interest. The classic problems with that vision, Williams writes, "the flaws of expert opinion, and the benefits of democratic diversity and debate - remain." But recognizing what LLMs actually are - not a continuation of social media but a corrective to it - is the first step toward addressing those problems.
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