"Autonomy or Empire"- Rethinking What AI Is For

This week, I spoke with Harry Law, Editorial Lead at the Cosmos Institute and a researcher at the University of Cambridge, about AI and autonomy. Harry wrote a terrific essay on how generative AI might serve human autonomy rather than the empires Big Tech is intent on building.In our conversation, we explore:* What the Cosmos Institute is — and how it’s challenging the binary, deterministic thinking that dominates tech.* The difference between “democratic” and “authoritarian” technologies — and why it depends less on the tools themselves than on the political, cultural, and economic systems they’re embedded in.* The gap between agency (Silicon Valley’s favorite word) and autonomy, and why that difference matters.* How generative AI can collapse curiosity — closing the reflective space between question and answer — and what it might mean to design it instead for wonder, inquiry, and self-understanding.* Why removing friction and optimizing for efficiency often strips away learning, growth, and self-actualization.* The need for more “philosophy builders” — technologists designing systems that expand our capacity to think, choose, and act for ourselves.* Harry’s provocative idea of personalized AIs grounded in our own values and second-order preferences — a radically different vision from today’s “personalization” built for engagement.The conversation around generative AI has gone stale. Everyone is interpreting it through their own frames of meaning — their own logics, values, incentives, and worldviews — yet we still talk about “AI” as if it’s a single, coherent, inevitable thing. It’s not.My conversation with Harry is an attempt to move beyond the binary — to imagine alternative pathways for technology that place human autonomy, curiosity, and moral imagination at the center.If you’re fed up with imagining alternative futures and want to do the hard, strategic work of changing the system you’re in, and set it — and you! — on a fundamentally new path, sign up for Cohort 5 of my course, Systems Change for Tech & Society Leaders. It kicks off in three weeks and there are still a few spots available.https://www.charley-johnson.com/sociotechnicalsystemschangeBefore you go: 3 ways I can help* Systems Change for Tech & Society Leaders - Everything you need to cut through the tech-hype and implement strategies that catalyze true systems change.* Need 1:1 help aligning technology with your vision of the future. Apply for advising & executive coaching here.* Organizational Support: Your organizational playbook for navigating uncertainty and making sense of AI — what’s real, what’s noise, and how it should (or shouldn’t) shape your system.P.S. If you have a question about this post (or anything related to tech & systems change), reply to this email and let me know! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit untangled.substack.com