An Email to a Friend About Authority

What holds institutions together when their organizing principle is gone?

Dear [Friend],

A few weeks ago I sent you some thoughts about AI and education. I want to follow up, because I think the problem I described there — the inability of AI to inculcate virtue in students — is really a specific instance of a much larger problem, which has to do with the basis of authority in all of our institutions, not just schools. I’ll try to be brief, although I’m not sure I’ll manage it.

*

The argument I made about education was, in short: AI will surpass human teachers at conveying subject matter, and this will destroy teachers’ authority, which will in turn destroy their ability to transmit the virtues that education actually exists to transmit. The subject matter of education was always, in McLuhan’s terms, merely the “message”, the “juicy piece of meat” upon which to focus pupils’ attention. The real work of education was the formation of virtues through pupils’ emulation of human teachers.

Now I want to suggest that a similar structure applies, though in very different ways, to the employment relationship, and many other institutional relationships in which one person has related authoritatively to another on the basis of knowing something that the other did not.

Consider the employee. For a long time, the implicit logic for the employment relationship has been something like: “This employee possesses some knowledge, or can process some information, in a way that produces value. We, the company, pay them for this, and the payment sustains them, and the whole arrangement is held together by the fact that the employee has knowledge or insight that the institution does not have without them.” The employee was being paid for holding what I’ll call leader authority — authority grounded in the possession and transmission of knowledge. It is the source of the employee’s authority over their (otherwise more powerful) employer. It is the same basis on which the teacher’s authority rested vis-a-vis students, and for the same reasons, it is in jeopardy.

It is important to understand exactly what I mean by authority, because the term is indispensable yet constantly misused. Following Kojève, Arendt and others, authority means the ability to act on another without that other resisting, even though nothing prevents their resistance. In other words, it has a complex relationship with power, and is not at all the same thing. As Arendt put it in Between Past and Future, “authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed.”

I borrow my categories of authority from Alexandre Kojève, who identified four basic types: the authority of the Leader, the Master, the Father, and the Judge. You don’t need to accept his whole framework to find these distinctions useful. I will say more about the others in a moment, but: Leader authority is the authority of the one who knows, directs, or predicts. It is the kind of authority that has been, for decades, the almost exclusive basis of institutional life in the United States. We have organized nearly everything, from employment to education, government, and even many personal relationships, around the question of who possesses relevant information and can deploy it effectively.

AI is poised to achieve something like a monopoly on this particular kind of authority. The first reaction will be disorientation, and not without reason, because many living people can scarcely conceive of institutional relationships that rest on any other basis. If leader authority is the only kind of authority you have ever known, then the collapse of leader authority looks like the collapse of authority as such—and therefore of all relations, all institutions, all reasons for human beings to respect one another or cooperate.

This will be particularly acute in the hyper-modern American context. In more traditional societies, there are thicker bonds, however frayed, that hold people together, and which have nothing to do with the exchange of information or the production of economic value. In bourgeois American society, we have been unusually thorough in stripping those bonds away. Money mediates nearly everything. Our institutional relationships are bottomlessly transactional. The employee works because he is paid; the institution pays because the employee produces; and if you take away the employee’s special knowledge or knowledge-processing capacity, you take away not only the reason for the payment, but also the only reason for the relationship and whatever modicum of dignity, respect, and authority it engendered. The whole thing hangs together by a strictly “informational” thread.

So we will suffer. Whole categories of employment and other important institutional relationships will become incoherent. Not just economically unviable, but conceptually incoherent — people will not be able to explain to themselves or others what they are doing, why they are participating in their company, their school, their agency, their shared projects. Education will undergo the same crisis I described in my earlier letter, but generalized: it is not only the teacher who will lose the ability to inculcate virtue through mastery of subject matter, but the manager, the consultant, the analyst, the editor, the advisor. Every role that was organized around processing knowledge (as opposed to monopolizing knowledge) will become less intelligible.

*

Now here is the part that I think is genuinely not pessimistic, though it may sound strange.

Leader authority is only one of four kinds of authority Kojève identified. And it was always, frankly, the most dubious of the four—the most susceptible to fraud, and the most easily confused with mere power. Leader authority has now been collapsing for the better part of a decade, for reasons not exclusively attributable to AI. Consider the backlash against scientism and blinkered technocratic “expertise”. It really is time for us to move on from this mode of authority, difficult as it will be.

The other three kinds of Kojèvian authority have a different character, and I want to suggest that they constitute a set of directions in which we can still move.

The authority of the Father is the authority of the elder, of tradition, of history. It subsists in the person who has lived longer and carries within them the continuity of experience across time. It is not the authority of someone who knows more facts, but of someone whose presence connects the present to the past. This authority cannot be claimed by an AI, because AI has no biography. It has training data, which is not the same thing. A grandfather’s authority over a grandchild does not consist in the grandfather’s information; it consists in the grandchild’s awareness of the grandfather’s status as progenitor and living representative of the entirety of the past. We will need to build a defense around this kind of authority. It will need to be cultivated, honored, and protected from the tendency of informational power to claim that it, too, represents history — that its mediation of old information makes it a representative of the past. It does not.

The authority of the Master is the authority of the one who has a mortal body and can lose it. This is the authority that arises from genuine risk, from literal skin in the game, from the capacity for irreversible loss. One can also think of it as concerning “exemplification” of a higher mode of being what one is — in our case, being human. Kojève thought that the dialectical cycles that Hegel and Marx called “history” would “end” when master authority was overcome and leveled out. When no one any longer had to risk death to be recognized as human, we’d all end up in a safe, low-stakes world. But this never happened, and master authority did not finally disappear, as low as the stakes briefly seemed in the post cold-war moment. (This is probably a good thing; Kojève’s deterministic prophesies of a post-historical world are unattractive…we ought not aspire to the total elimination of this or any other form of authority.) Today’s danger is that master authority can be counterfeited in a new way by non-mortals. Consider robots, for example, who seem to have mastered fear because they have no life to lose. But this only strikes us as authority when we forget that only mortals can demonstrate a higher, more fearless, and more self-sacrificing mode of being mortal.

The authority of the Judge is the authority of one who discerns the good. Not one who calculates optimal outcomes, but one who apprehends what is right. This kind of authority requires privileged access to timeless standards of the good, and this need may re-confront us with things truly out of style: prophesy and/or dogma. The authority of the judge cannot rest on an informational process of weighing evidence and computing probabilities about right and wrong. If it did, then AI could and would claim it. The authority of the judge must rest on a commitment to the good which is received, not self-defined, and validated by means other than computation. The judge does not and cannot arrive at justice in virtue of crunching more data than the next person, but must recognize it, both subjectively and in virtue of standing within a tradition. There is a role here for faith and institutional religion that I did not recognize and would not have foreseen ten years ago.

*

This is not as grandiose as it sounds.

The strategy I am suggesting is essentially one of concession and redirection. We will not manage to cling to leader authority. It can no longer serve as society’s connective tissue. AI will seize informational power to such a degree that informational authority will become a moot point. Instead, let us recognize that the other three kinds of authority still exist, still matter, and still cannot be claimed by any information-processing machine.

For education, this means the teacher’s role must be reimagined not as an inferior alternative to AI instruction, but as something that AI instruction categorically cannot provide: the living demonstration of human virtue in human circumstances, the presence of an elder, enduring mortal risk (even of the very prosaic kind, just being alive!) and embodying a tradition of judgment.

For employment, this means that the relationships holding institutions together will have to find new foundations. Not informational ones and therefore probably not monetary ones. The employee of the future (if “employee” remains the right word) will be valued not because she knows things, but because she is present, because she has a mortal body and a link to history or other people, because she carries within her a commitment to the good that cannot be summarized or replicated. The human institutions that survive will be those that figure out how to organize themselves around these qualities. The ones that try to hold onto leader authority as their organizing principle will simply find that they have little or no reason or capacity to mediate between humans.

In general, this points to a fundamental revaluation of what we consider valuable about human life and human experience. We have been told for a very long time that what makes us valuable is our ability to process information, to know things, to tell other people things they did not already know, to help institutions increase the sum of money which they have. If AI does all of this better than we do, as it will, then either we are valueless to one another, or that was never where our value lay. I know which answer I prefer. But preferring it is not enough. We will have to build the relationships and the habits of life that make the answer real.

I suspect this will be a strange and difficult period. It is not totally unrelated to Kojève’s famous “end of history”, the termination of geopolitics in a “universal and homogenous state”, but in important ways, it is completely other than he imagined, completely flipped or permuted. Kojève thought that history-driving master authority would be eliminated by the march of egalitarian progress, leading to a kind of universal, classless, conflictless world of the kind Fukuyama thought we were entering in 1989. But something else is happening: leader authority is being undermined by the march of power-seizing information technology. And all of our institutions, all of our relationships, will have to be rebuilt on the grounds of the other three types of authority.

I’d like to hear what you think.

Best,

Matt