Cheat Code: Who Wins and What We Lose With AI
A philosophical inquiry into why some "that’s cheating!" reactions are relics, while others respond to goods we can't afford to lose.
I'm currently working on a book that uses the arrival of artificial intelligence as a lens to rethink how ideas about effort, fairness, authenticity, and legitimacy give shape to so much of our lives. Thinking about these ideas can help make sense of our conflicting reactions to the sudden presence of AI in so much of what we do.
By so quickly changing what is hard, what is scarce, and what feels uniquely human, AI unsettles our intuitions about fairness and meaning, and challenges how we see our achievements and life projects. It strains the rules and norms that undergird our work, politics, and play and creates new forms of advantage, cheating, and power that will leave lasting marks on our social and political order.
What kinds of cheating really cheat us? Which norms are worth defending, and which might we reasonably concede in a time when everything feels at stake?
It makes a case for embracing the messy, the effortful. Not as an affectation or aesthetic quirk, as training wheels to be taken off when there's real work to do, but as fundamental to the experiences that animate our sense of the real and ground what we find meaningful and fair.
This isn’t just another book about AI. Reflecting on our experiences with technology opens up deeper questions about fairness, collaboration, and the ways we think about effort and legitimacy. And it's not an academic book, though parts of it are a philosophical inquiry into how we rely on each other and how technology mediates that reliance.
Our expectations and norms can fall out of sync with the new realities technology creates. We encounter moments when our inherited moral frameworks can no longer make sense of what the world has become.