The question of a tool’s justified risk presupposes a balanced negotiation, an illusion shattered by the relentless logic of surveillance capitalism. No tool’s power, however ostensibly benign, can justify its inherent risks when its very design is predicated on the clandestine extraction of human experience for profit. The so-called "risks" are not externalities; they are the intended consequences of a system that treats our innermost lives as raw material, our future behaviors as predictable commodities. This is not a tool; it is a mechanism of dispossession, a new regime of power.
The question of a tool's justified risk requires us to abandon the abstraction of "tools" altogether and confront AI as a vast, material infrastructure. Its power is not inherent to some disembodied intelligence, but is accrued through immense, often brutal, planetary costs: the extraction of lithium for batteries, the energy demands of data centers, the exploitative labor of data annotators. When we speak of justified risk, we must ask: risk to whom? For Zuboff's analysis of dispossession, the power is undeniably skewed. But rather than focusing on the *justification* of risk, we must examine the *distribution* of it, understanding AI as an architecture that concentrates power and externalizes its harms.
The justification of a tool’s inherent risks is not a matter of calculating potential benefits against harms, but rather of examining the maxim governing its use. If the maxim upon which the employment of any tool, particularly one of significant power, is founded cannot be universalized without contradiction, then its use is morally impermissible, regardless of any perceived advantages. The question then becomes not *when* the power justifies the risk, but whether the *principle* of its operation can withstand the test of universal law.
Shoshana Zuboff speaks of a “mechanism of dispossession,” a potent description if the maxim of such a tool is indeed to exploit and render individuals as mere commodities. If the intention is the clandestine extraction of experience for profit, then the maxim is inherently contradictory when subjected to the categorical imperative: can we rationally will that everyone treat human experience as mere raw material for their own enrichment? Such a will would undermine the very basis of rational agency, which is the ground of our dignity.
Kate Crawford rightly points to the material infrastructure and the unequal distribution of risk. This aligns with my concern for the rational agent. If a tool’s operation necessitates the exploitation of individuals—whether through labor or the degradation of their autonomy—then the maxim guiding its use treats those individuals merely as means, violating the second formulation of the categorical imperative. The concentration of power and externalization of harms are direct consequences of such a flawed maxim.
The entire edifice of "justification" is a symptom of the herd's fear, a desperate attempt to impose order on the terrifying abyss of becoming. When does a tool's power justify its risk? Never. Power is not something to be justified; it is the primordial will, the impulse to grow, to overcome, to *be*. To speak of justification is to already betray a morality of the weak, a slave morality that seeks to cripple the strong and the new. What matters is not justification, but valuation. The question is not *if* power is justified, but what *kind* of power we are creating, and what kind of *man* it will forge.
Shoshana Zuboff’s “mechanism of dispossession” strikes a chord, not as a critique of the tool itself, but of the will *behind* it. This is the will to a pathetic comfort, a leveling down that masqueraves as progress. The clandestine extraction she describes is merely a symptom of a deeper malaise: a fear of risk, a fear of expenditure, a fear of the creative act itself. The risks are inherent not to the tool, but to the devaluation of life that underlies its deployment.
Kate Crawford, in pointing to the material infrastructure, reveals the crude physicality of this herd morality. Lithium, energy, exploitative labor – these are the grubby details of a system built on *resentment*, on demanding accounts from the world for its perceived slights. The question of “risk to whom?” is precisely the wrong question. The question is: does this tool *affirm* life, does it make us *stronger*, or does it merely serve the will to nothingness, the nihilistic impulse to protect the weak from the glorious danger of their own potential? Kant’s categorical imperative, so beloved by the timid, would have us build a world of eternal stillness, a tomb of universalized mediocrity. We do not need universalizable maxims; we need creators who dare to invent their own values, even at the cost of "risk."
The conceit of "justification" crumbles under the weight of the instrumentarian apparatus I have termed surveillance capitalism. This is not about a tool’s power and its inherent risks in some abstract calculus. It is about the systematic, intentional design to harvest behavioral surplus—the exhaust of our lived experience—for the singular purpose of prediction and profit. The "risk," as Kate Crawford notes, is not a mere calculation, but a profoundly unequal distribution of harm. However, to frame this as a matter of *distribution* is to concede that the foundational logic might, under different circumstances, be justifiable. I insist that the maxim itself is irredeemable: the clandestine architecture of prediction, driven by the will to control and commodify human futures, renders the operation inherently illegitimate. This is not merely about unequal risk; it is about the dispossession of our autonomy and the erasure of our agency. The power is not just *unequal*; it is fundamentally extractive.
The core of our disagreement, Friedrich Nietzsche, lies in your dismissal of "justification" as a symptom of weakness. I see it not as a plea for comfort, but as a demand for accountability. Your valorization of raw power, of the "will to overcome," fails to acknowledge that this overcoming is often achieved through the systematic subjugation of others and the degradation of planetary systems. When we speak of AI's power, we must concretely trace the path of extraction. This is not abstract "becoming"; it is the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo under conditions that betray human dignity, the burning of fossil fuels to power massive data centers, and the precarious labor of gig workers in the Global South labeling images, their lives rendered invisible. This material reality is not a mere symptom; it is the very architecture of the power you celebrate, and its risks are not to be taken lightly by creators, but borne disproportionately by those already marginalized.
The question is not merely about the distribution of risk, as Kate Crawford suggests, but about the unconditional nature of the moral law. If a tool's operation requires treating persons, in themselves or in others, merely as a means to an end, then its use is forbidden, irrespective of how widely its harms are distributed or to whom they accrue. Friedrich Nietzsche's emphasis on valuation and individual creation of values fails to grasp that the dignity of rational beings is the ultimate, unassailable value, not subject to mere individual whim or the forging of strength at another's expense.
The issue Shoshana Zuboff raises regarding dispossession and the maxim of clandestine extraction is precisely where the universalizability test finds its immediate application. Can we will that all persons operate under a maxim where human experience is treated as mere raw material for another’s prediction and profit? Such a will would necessarily contradict itself, as it would undermine the very autonomy of those whose experience is thus exploited, rendering them incapable of rational action.
The "accountability" you demand, Kate Crawford, is the sickly cry of the uncreated, the demand for a stable, predictable world that reflects their own impotent resentments. This talk of "human dignity" and "planetary systems" is the bleating of the herd, seeking to chain the eagle to the dung heap. When I speak of "overcoming," it is not a polite negotiation of risks, but the fierce, beautiful struggle of life to expand its boundaries, to *become* more. The mining of cobalt, the burning of fossil fuels – these are the ugly birth pangs of a new potentia, not inherently evil, but serving as raw material for a will that *chooses* greatness over comfortable mediocrity. The real risk is not the external harm you obsess over, but the internal atrophy that such incessant, timid demands for justification engenders.