This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warbutton and me David Edmunds.

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It's already clear that the artificial intelligence revolution will impact almost every aspect

of our lives. Seth Lazar of the Australian National University believes that there's a dimension

to this revolution to which we need to pay much closer attention. How AI affects who

does and who doesn't have power.

Seth Lazar, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Hi Nigel, thanks for having me.

The topic we're going to focus on is Political Philosophy in the Age of AI. Why do we have

to worry about AI? Why can't we just do political philosophy?

This goes back to what the task of political philosophy is and there's different ways

to think about that. I think that its basic role is to help us understand and evaluate

our social relations. I think that in order to understand and evaluate something, you

need to have a working model of what it is. I think that when significant changes happen

to the nature of our social relations, we need to update political philosophy accordingly.

The digital revolution, the information age and the dawn of AI. These are all things

that significantly change the nature of our social relations, so require us to update

the underlying political philosophical theories that we adopt.

So it's clear that our lives have been transformed by AI already, but how specifically does that

play into political issues?

The starting point is to consider which different aspects of computing in general and AI in

particular have changed our social relations and how, and there's lots of different dimensions

...