Achieving consensus can be hard, so wouldn’t it be nice if a machine could produce it as a kind of consumption good? Instead of having to work throu

Habermas machines - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

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2024-10-22 17:00:04

Achieving consensus can be hard, so wouldn’t it be nice if a machine could produce it as a kind of consumption good? Instead of having to work through differences and emotions collectively and collaboratively, each individual could articulate their position and their critiques alone and then a model could sort out what the underlying average position of all the participants in a “discussion” should be understood to be. Everyone can treat the machine as an unbiased witness and agree with it without seeming to have to agree with each other. No one’s ego would be bruised by any other ego; no wills would clash. Everyone could automate their civic duty without having to undergo the hardship of confronting other citizens or empathizing with them; instead their beliefs become disembodied abstractions, statistical constructs rather than liven experiences. Political deliberation could become a matter of everyone preaching their views into a phone and waiting for an opinion calculator to decide the state of the public sphere. And the phone, in turn, could in the meantime barrage users with statements optimized to moderate and normalize their views so that dissensus is smoothed away at scale.

Researchers from Google recently issued a paper describing what they call a “Habermas machine,” a LLM meant to help “small groups find common ground while discussing divisive political issues” by iterating “group statements that were based on the personal opinions and critiques from individual users, with the goal of maximizing group approval ratings.” Participants in their study “consistently preferred” the machine-generated statements to those produced by humans in the group and helped reduce the diversity of opinion within the group, which researchers interpret as “AI … finding common ground among dicussants with diverse views.” So much for the “lifeworld” and “intersubjective recognition.” It appears that people are more likely to agree with a position when it appears that no one really holds it than to agree with a position articulated by another person. It’s sort of like Žižek’s idea of the Big Other in reverse.