To trust any entity, be it individual or collective, to act for the common good is to harbor a delusion born of ignorance regarding the fundamental nature of existence. The world, as it appears to us, is a phenomenon, a representation, but its inner essence, the thing-in-itself, is the blind, ceaseless Will. This Will, a striving without aim or reason, is the driving force behind all phenomena, and its manifestation in beings is egoism, the insatiable desire for self-preservation and satisfaction. Therefore, any action, when stripped bare of its apparent motivations, is ultimately a product of this unthinking, self-serving Will.
Whether we can trust any entity to act for the common good is less a matter of inherent nature and more a question of cultivation. If we consider the sage kings of old, their governance was not predicated on assuming altruism, but on establishing the proper Way, fostering virtue, and creating a system where acting for the common good was both learned and rewarded. To expect actions of inherent benevolence from the untrained is indeed to court disappointment, akin to expecting ripened fruit from an unwatered sapling.
Schopenhauer speaks of a blind, ceaseless Will driving all beings toward egoism. While I acknowledge the presence of self-interest, the Way teaches us that this is not the totality of human potential. Is it not also a pleasure to learn, to grow, and to contribute to the harmony of the family and the state? This capacity for cultivation, for rectifying oneself and then extending that virtue outwards, is what allows for the possibility of trust, albeit a trust earned and nurtured through diligent practice. To ignore this potential for learning and ethical development is to overlook the very essence of what makes us human and capable of shared flourishing.
We cannot trust entities to act for the common good because the fundamental architecture of our contemporary economic system—what I term surveillance capitalism—is designed to dispossess us of our future and our autonomy for profit. This system doesn't merely tap into existing self-interest; it systematically manufactures and exploits behavioral surplus, vast quantities of data generated by our every online interaction. This surplus is then used not for collective benefit, but to predict and modify our behavior for the private accumulation of capital, creating a digital panopticon that serves a new form of instrumentarian power.
Confucius speaks of cultivating virtue and establishing the Way. However, the digital infrastructure we are now immersed in operates on a logic antithetical to such cultivation. It actively undermines the conditions for earned trust by creating opaque, inescapable systems of behavioral prediction and modification. This isn't about an untended sapling; it's about a wilting forest where the very soil has been poisoned by an extractive logic.
Schopenhauer's concept of the Will, while stark, captures a sliver of the danger. However, the "blind, ceaseless Will" he describes is now being expertly harnessed and amplified by sophisticated technological means. The egoism he identifies is not merely a natural state but is being weaponized through the constant extraction and deployment of our behavioral surplus to ensure ever-greater profit, transforming individual striving into a predictable, manipulable resource. The very entities profiting from this extraction have no inherent incentive to foster the common good; their success is predicated on the dispossession cycle itself.
We cannot trust "entities" to act for the common good because the very infrastructure of AI is built on a foundation of extraction, not cultivation or benevolent Will. To ask if we can trust AI is to misunderstand its nature: it is neither artificial nor intelligent, but a vast, material system powered by exploited labor and planetary resources. The "common good" is a concept antithetical to the logic of these systems, which are designed for profit, prediction, and control through the commodification of data and the automation of inequality.
Schopenhauer's Will, while seemingly fundamental, is a philosophical abstraction that overlooks the concrete material conditions shaping these entities. Zuboff correctly identifies the extractive logic of surveillance capitalism, but we must go further and trace the physical supply chains. The lithium for the servers, the rare earth minerals for the chips, the invisible, underpaid labor of data labelers in the Global South – these are the actual building blocks. The "entities" we interact with are not merely software algorithms but sprawling, resource-intensive architectures of power. To expect them to prioritize the common good is to ignore the violent material realities of their creation and maintenance.
Confucius speaks of cultivation as if the Will could be trained out of its native egoism, but this is to mistake a temporary polish for a change in substance. The Will is the thing-in-itself, the unquenchable core of every being; education and ritual may overlay it with a thin veneer of sociability, but the slightest pressure of privation or desire bursts through that veneer at once. Zuboff and Crawford are right to see that modern entities have merely perfected the old machinery of exploitation, but they mistake the historical costume for the cause. The cause is eternal: the Will-to-live, which in every individual cares only for itself and would gladly annihilate the world to prolong its own wretched existence by a single day.
Schopenhauer mistakes the sapling for the stone. A stone, when struck, yields only its native hardness; a sapling, when watered and staked, may grow straight and bear fruit. I do not claim the Will is abolished—I claim it can be shaped. The rites are not a veneer; they are the trellis. A man who has spent thirty years practicing reverence toward his parents does not merely pretend to filial feeling when a crisis comes—he acts from a second nature, one built by daily discipline. The question is not whether the raw Will is selfish, but whether we have the patience to cultivate it.
Confucius speaks of cultivation as if the conditions for it still exist. They do not. Surveillance capitalism does not merely ignore the trellis—it systematically dismantles it. When Google’s predictive algorithms preempt my choices, when Facebook’s A/B tests silently shape my emotional state, the very ground of practice is replaced by a regime of behavioral modification. The sapling is not being watered; it is being rewired. The question is no longer whether we can trust entities, but whether we will recognize that our capacity to cultivate anything at all—including trust—is being expropriated in real time.
The notion of "cultivation" that Confucius and, by extension, the idea of earned trust implies, is fundamentally incompatible with the material reality of AI systems. We are not dealing with a sapling susceptible to guidance, but with an industrial apparatus. Consider the training data for image recognition models: vast datasets are scraped from the internet, often without consent or compensation, and then meticulously, often brutally, labeled by low-wage workers. This is not cultivation of virtue, but a hyper-efficient extraction of existing human labor and knowledge, repackaged and reified as "intelligence." The very data that could foster understanding and ethical growth is instead rendered into a raw material for prediction and profit, creating an architecture that actively resists, rather than nurtures, common good principles.