The Last Human Question: Generative AI's Existential Threat to Consensus and Law

Authors

• Joshua Fairfield, Washington and Lee University School of Law

Document Type

Article

Abstract

The true risk of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is not that the toasters will rise up. It is that AI will be competent to perform human tasks and indifferent to human welfare. The risk is that we will be outcompeted by generative automated processes that create output similar to ours (although never the same, as this Article explains), but which need none of the outputs of the economy for food, shelter, or human flourishing. Further, a more precise and existential description of the threat is that generative AI will disrupt and crowd out humanity’s evolutionary superpower, our ability to generate agreement on how to live together—law. Generative AI disrupts our ability to generate consensus through the medium of meaning, culture, and language. As generative AI spams the channel, it drowns out human voices and human-constructed meaning. This Article describes how AI threatens our ability to create legal consensus, and proposes specific interventions to keep the question of how we live together—the last human question—one that permits human thriving.

Recommended Citation

Joshua Fairfield, The Last Human Question: Generative AI's Existential Threat to Consensus and Law, 128 W. Va. L. Rev. 895 ().
Available at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol128/iss3/4