alt Hacker NewsAI Destroys Institutions
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We should be more worried what AI will due to the ability of an average human to think.
Not that I think there is a lot of thinking going on now anyway, thanks to our beloved smartphones.
But just think about a time when human ability to reason has atrophied globally. AI might even give us true Idiocracy!
Just from reading the abstract, it feels like the authors didn't even attempt at trying to be objective. It hard to take what they're saying seriously when the language is so loaded and full of judgments. The kind of language you'd expect in an Op-Ed and not a research paper
This is nothing but speculation written by lawyers in the format of a scientific paper to feign legitimacy. Of course those $500 an hour nitpickers are terrified of AI because it threatens the exorbitant income of their cartel protected profession.
> Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo.
I am not sure if I am off-topic, but I am having a lot of trouble with this statement. Institutions are often opaque, and I have never belonged to an institution that empowered me to "take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo." Quite the contrary.
None of these paper's arguments are AI specific. The IRS doesn't need AI to make mistakes and be unable to tell you why it did so. You can find stories of that happening to people already.
>Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust...
In the 1960s, trust in institutions was around 70%.
In 2025 it's about 17%.
This is not something like we had 70% until 2023 and then AI dropped our trust suddenly. If anything, AI doesnt even register on the graph.
So correlation here is practically non-existent. Gallup and Pew have the similar trends for journalists and universities.
You dont get to blame AI for this.
Interesting bump and question. How did clinton improve reputation and then bush destroy it? Or is that a false hump?
Who do institutions serve? To me AI democratises information. Allows access to information that would normally be gatekept. AI reduces barriers, and they don't like that because those barriers gave them authority.
I was amused at how they quote War Games.
I fear the title of this article is going drive most of the conversation.
I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but so far the parts of the argument I can pull out are about how Institutions actually work, as in a collection of humans. AI, as it currently stands, interacts with humans themselves in ways that hollow out the kind of behavior we want from institutions.
“ Perhaps if human nature were a little less vulnerable to the siren’s call of shortcuts, then AI could achieve the potential its creators envisioned for it. But that is not the world we live in. Short-term political and financial incentives amplify the worst aspects of AI systems, including domination of human will, abrogation of accountability, delegation of responsibility, and obfuscation of knowledge and control”
An analogy that I find increasingly useful is that of someone using a forklift to lift weights at gym. There is an observable tendency when using LLMs, to cede agency entirely to the machine.
> The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other.
This affordability is HEAVILY subsidized by billionaires who want to destroy institutions for selfish and ideological reasons.
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> free press
Stopped reading here, as these people still believe in that fairytale of theirs.
A thought provoking essay on impact of AI systems civic institutions.
This dire warning against AI echoes the anxieties of a much earlier elite: the late-medieval clergy facing the invention of the printing press. For centuries, they held a privileged monopoly on knowledge, controlling its interpretation and dissemination. The printing press threatened to shatter that authority by democratizing access to information and empowering individuals.
Similarly, today's critics, often from within the very institutions they defend, frame AI as a threat to "expertise" and "civic life" when in reality, they fear it as a threat to their own status as the sole arbiters of truth. Their resistance is less a principled defense of democracy and more a desperate attempt to protect a crumbling monopoly on knowledge.
I would summarize the central claim of the paper as: the widespread use of AI to mediate human interaction will rob people of agency, understanding and skill development, as well as destroying the social links necessary to maintain and improve institutions, while at the same time allowing powerful unaccountable actors (AI cabal) to interject into those relations and impose their institutional goals; by "institution" we mean a shared set of beneficial social rules, not merely an organization tasked with promoting them, "justice" vs. "US justice system".
The authors then break down the mechanisms by which AI achieves these outcomes (that seem quite reductive and dated compared to the frontier, for example they take it as granted that AI cannot be creative, that it can only work prospectively and can't react to new situations and events etc.), as well as exemplifying those mechanism already at work in a few areas like journalism and academia.