On Common Sense and Expertise - Hannah Arendt on technology and scientific knowledge

Happy New Year! And welcome to Ever Not Quite, a newsletter about technology and humanism. This essay responds to what I call a “strange fissure” that seems to run through modern technologists, who possess a technical competence that gives them authority over those who don’t share their expertise, but who nonetheless remain human beings whose perspective is still rooted in the same human experiences as the rest of us. At bottom, this fissure demarcates two ways of conceiving the world: one scientifically objective, having freed itself of any particular interest in human concerns as such, and another social and political outlook that is ineluctably rooted in a human standpoint. How best to think about this internal division has been the subject of much debate for centuries now. 

Here, I argue that perennial debates about the relationship between politics and expertise continue to reverberate through our contemporary discourse about the human implications of artificial intelligence and the algorithmic management of our world. The emergence of AI in particular raises questions about the place of the human being in the universe that echo those posed by the prospect of space travel in the mid-20th century; in both cases, technological devices and practices take up and reflect a prior theoretical displacement of the human being within the immensity of the universe. I look to Hannah Arendt’s short 1963 essay “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man”, which proves to be a surprisingly relevant and prescient guide to these topics. 

I hope you find it interesting, and as always, thank you for listening!