This year marks the 150<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, arguably the greatest of all novels. Among the book’s central motifs is the fragility and contingency of human knowledge, and the subsequent futility of trying to create a social science. In an eternal warning to central planners everywhere, Tolstoy portrayed human beings as existing in a world of contingency and immediacy, continually forced to answer to events entirely unheralded and unexpected. Ultimately, humans need to be guided by something deeper than what can be found through an examination of the empirical world. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion, shows how Tolstoy used his literary gifts to show the absurdity of what would become known as scientism, or any other reductionist account of the human.
Keeping the AI Apocalypse at Bay
Writing in City Journal, Judge Glock examines legal efforts to control AI and dismisses the current fixation on suing for specific harms, such as bad advice. “The idea that we should treat Big Tech, including AI companies, like we treated Big Tobacco, is exactly the wrong idea,” he observes. A better approach is to assess product liability based on which parties can perform the task at the cheapest cost, as is the case with the regulation of medical equipment. This “has the benefit of putting the onus on companies themselves to game out dangerous scenarios and prevent them,” he advises. For more on AI, see this C2C article.
