Natural Sociability and Political Association – UCLA Livescu Initiative on Neuro, Narrrative, and AI

To initiate our inquiry, we organized a two-day workshop on December 2024, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’. The aim of the workshop is to subject various parts of the conceptual framework which often underpins contemporary responses to this challenge to serious and sustained intellectual scrutiny. It will do so by digging deep into the intellectual history of a succession of theories about society and the state whose terms demonstrably continue to structure the terms in which we currently construe the problem.

At the center of this investigation is the question of human sociality. We are interested in some of the major discussions of this issue in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy which acquire a particularly influential shape in the works of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. – and in the juridical texts which came to form the corpus of Roman law. Our workshop will sort through some of the complexities of this classical inheritance in order to make sense of a series of philosophical and legal contentions which begin to inform social and political thinking from the fourteenth century onwards as a consequence of the absorption of ancient philosophical and legal doctrine into the mainstream of European and extra-European intellectual and ideological life.

Current discussions of the place of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in contemporary culture have helped bring back into view a basic philosophical question which has long preoccupied social and political theorists: to what extent, if any, should we regard the kind of rationality required to ensure the successful government of states – and to guarantee the healthy operation of society within their individual and collective embrace – as the product of a distinctively and irreducibly human nature which is necessarily social? This line of inquiry is worth reprising in the face of a welter of claims about the potential for AI technology to supplant the place of human agents in the provision of some crucial political, social and cultural services – in the conduct of war, in the administration of healthcare, in the education of citizens, in the regulation of finance, in the generation of forms of art, and so on. These activities have been assumed historically to depend for their success upon a sequence of indissociably human cognitive processes: mental operations such as perception, evaluation, judgement and decision-making. But the challenge we now face is to ask whether the involvement of human agents in such activities is, in fact, always a prerequisite of their satisfactory performance; and, if so, on what grounds.