Life Cannot Be Delegated

In a "1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”... Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners".

The bribe "Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract"? Everyone gets "every material advantage ... must not ask for nothing that the system does not provide... likewise agree to take everything ... in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires... if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified."

However, that's just a prelude: “a life that is full and whole... meaning, purpose, satisfaction... personal integrity... cannot be delegated ... it requires our whole-person involvement... [not] outsourcing involvement to a technological device ... or... technologically mediated distraction".

cf "Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds ... when crossed, render the technology or institution counterproductive". So these things are not "good or bad by nature... might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become... counterproductive ... eventually destructive."

"So What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?... an especially relevant question” in the upcoming age of AI agents. We need to "critically consider ... where the thresholds of delegation might be", so we can avoid "delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful... especially ... how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility... —the very things... that make life meaningful... even [in] our mundane everyday work" cf "the etymology of mundane... suggests something that is “of this world.”"

Finally, "a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated", cf Steven Garber, who "argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be."

Two sides of the same coin: "To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world."