B. Scot Rousse

This week on my philosophy page, Without Why, I share some thoughts on what some AI researchers are starting to call the project of "human alignment." For example, @Houda_nait Nait El Barj recently opened a conversation about human alignment in terms of the alignment of the self to itself. This opens up an existential dimension that the broader alignment debate has largely ignored so far. In my post, I take up Houda's thread and develop it further. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Kuhn, and Kierkegaard, I argue that the self is not a stable set of values waiting to be retrieved and reinforced, but a style — a holistic orientation that organizes what has salience for us, what shows up as mattering — and that this style shifts across a life in ways that resists optimization. For example, an AI system calibrated to your past commitments may be scaffolding for a home you've already begun to leave. Can machines be attuned to the work of helping us become who we are? Only if they are designed to preserve the unsettlement that such becoming inevitably, rather than engineering or smoothing it away. Check out the full piece and let me know what you think! Link below.

I recently posted a remembrance of the philosopher and AI critic Hubert Dreyfus. This post focuses on his legendary teaching style. #hubertdreyfus #bertdreyfus #dreyfus

New post Care as the Foundation of Human-Compatible AI open.substack.com/pub/withoutwhy…

@SuPark19570 @frontiertower Thank you Su Park!

Join me in SF on Monday 3/16: “Why Not Brain Rot: AI and Contemporary Nihilism.” The event will take place on the Human Flourishing floor of Frontier Tower in San Francisco. We will get started just after 6pm. To attend the event please sign up at the Luma link in my bio. Join us!

@JeremyStunt Nicely put, Jeremy!

Work is what we do. We can't not work.

Please check out my new article here:

I have a new piece of public philosophy out today in IAI News. My preferred title was "Why Work Matters in the Age of Automation." The editors of IAI News opted for one with a bit more philosophical flair. In any case, I'm proud of the piece and would love to hear what you think. This writing enabled me to draw together my scholarly training in phenomenology, my extensive experience working as a consultant and coach with Fernando Flores and Pluralistic Networks, my work with Stuart Dreyfus on updating the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, and my new collaboration with Professor Julian Jonker (Wharton School) on frameworks for assessing how AI will reshape human work. open.substack.com/pub/withoutwhy…

New post on my philosophy page, Without Why. I reply to a reader's assessment that my writing about care didn't adequately capture his experience of caregiving for his aging parents. This provided occasion for much-needed clarifications and extensions of my recent explorations of care. Check it out, and let me know what you think. Link in bio!

We need richer conceptions of human agency and autonomy in the AI alignment discourse.

@BrianRoemmele I’m helping in a project to digitize Dreyfus’s vast archive of philosophy lectures. Learn more and support our efforts here: givebutter.com/dreyfus

“Analysis is for beginners and intuition is for experts”—Dr. HUBERT DREYFUS, 1985 I met Dr. Dreyfus in 1986 when I was building expert systems in my 40Mhz IBM PC/AT and we spoke in detail about the AI world we are in today. AI must become intuitive to reach AGI, I know how.

I have exciting news from The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the Dreyfus family to carry forward Professor Dreyfus’s philosophical legacy. Our first major project is the launch of the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive, a professionally restored and curated collection of his philosophy lectures, drawn from a vast body of recordings currently confined to aging cassette tapes and unofficial YouTube copies. A prescient critic of early AI and a legendary teacher at Berkeley for nearly fifty years, Dreyfus offered unusually clear and grounded ways of thinking about how technologies shape human skill, meaning, and everyday life. His voice speaks directly to questions many of us are struggling to articulate today, as AI systems become increasingly pervasive. Support the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive here: givebutter.com/dreyfus Supporting this project helps bring this work into durable public access, ensuring that students, researchers, and a wider audience can engage with a philosophical inheritance that is especially urgent at this moment. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider sharing this project with colleagues, students, or friends who may want to help bring this archive into being. Warmly, B. Scot Rousse, on behalf of The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, Inc

I’m pleased to announce the Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive Project!

Punk is a response to technological nihilism. It creates meaning where the world increasingly withholds it. Read my last post of the year to see how. Link is biography.