The Future of Censorship

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I'm curious to your views on AI censorship because as you pointed out in a 1984 world, it's extremely hard to censor things. In an AI monitor world where all the different social media sites could be monitored by the government simultaneously and if a company is captured by whatever government that it's under maybe the government can put controls in the end. We are very far from AIs that can do the subtle complex censorship but you know, it will come and it will get better - people are already trying to do it even with the ones that will censor. This is a big threat and one of the biggest threats is that it removes one of the most important permeabilities of past censorship organizations which is

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How does the current information revolution compare to previous information revolutions? What kind of event or set of events counts as an information revolution? Why do new information technologies usually amplify the most extreme voices first? Why are intentions not very useful as a metric for determining whether a particular kind of censorship is good or bad? When, if ever, is censorship appropriate or morally acceptable? Why were officials of the Inquisition much more worried about slight deviations in theology than outright agnosticism or atheism? What are the implications of using AI to censor certain kinds of information? What do people misunderstand about history? Why are there so many more futuristic dystopian stories than utopian stories? What is "plural" agency, and why do we need more stories about it?

Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on radical thought and the recovery of the classics in the Italian Renaissance. She works on the history of science, religion, heresy, freethought, atheism, censorship, books, printing, and on patronage and the networks of power and money that enabled cultural creation in early modern Europe. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and her first book is Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance. Find out more about her at adapalmer.com.

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