AI, reparations and the harm principle - new Letters on Liberty out now.

Our latest publication of pamphlets on freedom are now available to read and share...

Jul 09, 2023

Back in December 2020, as an antidote to Lockdown and a challenge to ourselves, the Academy of Ideas launched Letters on Liberty. Almost three years and 33 pamphlets later, our project to reimagine questions of liberty for a twenty-first-century context is going strong.

We’ve just published three new Letters on crucial issues for liberty. Sandy Starr, of the Progress Educational Trust, has penned an investigation of generative AI - looking at the rights and wrongs of our current moral panic about robots taking over. If we lose the capacity to distinguish ourselves and one another from machines, he writes, then in some sense it is we who have failed a test, rather than our machines that have passed one.

Then, we have our own Academy of Ideas science and technology director Rob Lyons, who asks us to look again at JS Mill’s ‘harm principle’, and question whether it is fit for purpose today. How do we live together in a society, when one person’s freedom is another person’s nightmare? In an age when harms abound - from crackdowns on protest to the Online Safety Bill all arguing in favour of protecting against ‘harm’ - Rob argues that we need to demand the right to offend the sensibilities of those who want to deny us freedom.

Last, but not least, author and historian James Heartfield takes on the issue of reparations - fresh from publishing his new book, Britain's Empires: A History, 1600-2020. In his Letter, James investigates the history of reparations, detailing how, time after time, reparations came to represent the interests of the compensating power, not the compensated. No act of reparation will ever satisfy the disappointment that its champions feel, he writes, because the problem they are trying to deal with is their lack of authority in the present, not the injuries done to their forbears in the past.

These are just the three latest Letters in our series - there are many others to catch up on, from the Seductive Power of Literature to the Freedom of the Open Road, the Trans Ideology Trap to the Sovereign Subjects of History. Take a look at our Letters on Liberty website to see what you’ve missed.

These pamphlets are available online, but we decided to print them, both as beautiful texts and as weapons in the style of the radical history of pamphleteering, to be passed from pocket to pocket and person to person. Each Letter stakes a claim for how to forge a freer society in the here and now. We hope that, armed with them, you take on the challenge of fighting for liberty.

To get Letters on Liberty to your door, fresh off the printing press, sign up or upgrade to a paid subscription below, and send us your postal address.

AI: SEPARATING MAN FROM MACHINE

Sandy Starr

The author of this Letter on Liberty is a human, and he assumes that the same is true of you. What guarantee do either of us have?

This question is reminiscent of the Turing test - the ‘imitation game’, famously proposed by computing pioneer Alan Turing, which assesses a machine’s ability to imitate a human convincingly. The question has been given renewed urgency by today’s ‘generative’ artificial intelligence (AI).

AI encompasses a wide range of technologies, developed since the 1950s, that supposedly emulate things done by human brains and/or human minds (delete according to one’s philosophy). The AI tools that currently dominate the headlines are called ‘generative’ because they generate seemingly unique, bespoke creations - text, images, code - in response to ‘prompts’ submitted by people.

The results can be spectacular. There was controversy when first prize in the ‘digital arts’ category at the 2022 Colorado State Fair fine art competition was awarded to Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial, a piece created via generative AI by gaming company CEO Jason Allen. My imagination was fired by this (pretentiously titled) image of robed, vaguely humanoid forms, two of whom - one sporting a bustle and perhaps a spindly appendage like the legs of Dalí’s Elephants, another echoing the attitude of Tenniel's Red Queen - are looking at, or through…

BEYOND THE HARM PRINCIPLE

Rob Lyons

Mill’s ‘harm principle’ is frequently cited as the quintessential defence of personal autonomy. The state should not be able to interfere in our private choices, even if it might be widely agreed that such choices are harmful to ourselves, unless they cause harm to others. For example, if I want to smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol or engage in other risky behaviours, that should be down to me - and me alone. If I want to express a controversial view, I should be free to do so. If I want to drive a car or take a flight, regardless of claims about what this might do to the planet, these are matters for me alone.

Although Mill’s statement of the idea is most commonly cited, it was not entirely new. In 1789, in revolutionary France, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stated:

‘Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.’

But the meddlesome opponents of freedom, from nanny-state obsessives to free-speech restricters, have found that by expanding the notion of harm and undermining tolerance, the ‘harm principle’ can be used as an argument against freedom…

In fact, that problem was always there in Mill’s harm principle - or, at least, in the simple version set out early in On Liberty. Logically, the harm principle soon…

AGAINST REPARATIONS

James Heartfield

Some kind of slavery has been around throughout much of human history. But the Atlantic Slave Trade between 1440 and 1863 was easily the most vicious case. More than nine million Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic Ocean by European traders. British captains like Francis Drake and John Hawkins shipped slaves from the 1560s onwards. King Charles I set up the Guinea Company to trade slaves in 1631, and his son Charles II founded the Royal African Company to re-launch the trade in 1672. In the eighteenth century, ships out of Liverpool, Bristol and London made Britain the biggest slave trader in the world. Fully 3,200,000 enslaved Africans were taken across the Atlantic in British ships.

The journey called the Middle Passage across the Atlantic ocean was hellish. Between 1789 and 1805, 14 out of every 100 slaves died from dysentery, tuberculosis and infected wounds, all made worse by being chained in overcrowded holds without sanitation or clean water.

Most of the slaves on British ships were taken to British colonies in the Caribbean. Here, they were sold and forced to work, mostly on sugar or sometimes…