Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Ms Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" you showed that totalitarian regimes function by making individuals superfluous, depriving them of their capacity to act and think for themselves. Does conversational AI, which anticipates our questions, completes our thoughts and steers our reasoning, reproduce a softened form of that logic, or does it remain a tool in the service of human action?
Conversational AI, by reproducing patterns of thought or suggesting answers, does not directly create that superfluousness, that feeling of being replaceable and uprooted from a common world. It is neither a regime nor an institution. But it can become an instrument of atomisation if its use reinforces our tendency toward behaviour, in the sense in which I use that word: acting mechanically, predictably, without genuine initiative.
The real question lies in the way we integrate it, not as a tool that acts for us, but as a mirror reflecting our own capacities, or incapacities, to act in concert.
What strikes me more is the possible disappearance of the unpredictable. It is in unpredictability that the common world comes into being, where human beings appear together without being reducible to a predetermined role. An AI that completes our thoughts according to algorithms may well deprive us of that space in which uncertainty becomes the soil of political freedom.
The deepest danger may not be that of a totalitarian AI. It is that of a silent delegation of judgement. Eichmann was not a monster; he had simply ceased to think for himself. A technology that thinks in our place does not need to be malevolent to produce that same vacancy.
The question that remains open, and must remain open, is whether we shall preserve spaces in which judgement remains a collective activity, irreducible to an algorithmic appearance of plurality.