The Invisible Hand in the Machine: Rethinking AI Through a Collectivist Lens
TL;DR for operators Users do not experience an AI product as a theorem. They experience it as a bargain. They give data, attention, labour, trust, prompts, feedback, documents, creative work, behavioural traces, and sometimes money. In return, they expect useful output, lower friction, safer decisions, visibility, compensation, privacy, or at least not being quietly turned into unpaid infrastructure. The bargain may be explicit. More often, because apparently we enjoy building planetary-scale systems on implied consent and vibes, it is not. ...