AI AND THE CONSERVATIVE MIND: HUMAN FLOURISHING BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND AUTOMATION:
The rise of artificial intelligence has inspired fear and raised questions concerning efficiency and productivity, but also regarding the deeper purposes of education, work, and human cognition itself. As a response, a false dichotomy emerges within traditional ideological disputes: a ‘classically liberal’, libertarian-leaning free-market position that defends unregulated AI in the name of progress and growth through the enhancement of human efforts or the elimination of menial jobs, and a social democratic position that advocates for the protection of workers’ rights, jobs, and justice. The falsity in this dichotomy is accompanied by a reductionist view focused solely on economics, even on the part of the social democratic position, which sticks to the concepts of labour, redistribution, and economic necessity. At the crux of this debate, the conservative view is distorted through its misleading appropriation by the libertarian camp or depicted as obsolete in the face of innovation.
This symposium examines whether conservatism provides a normatively valuable response to the phenomenon of AI, basing itself on the premise that conservative thought is well equipped to address these challenges, insofar as it foregrounds a thicker, more substantive conception of human flourishing, the cultivation of communities, and the pursuit of the good.
In contrast to perspectives that treat education and work primarily as human capital formation or as systems of credentialing and labour-market preparation, a conservative approach foregrounds education as character formation, oriented toward the development of vocation, virtue, and intellectual and moral judgment. The symposium explores the hypothesis that conservatism, in many of its diverse forms, is particularly well-positioned to articulate the limits and threats of technological substitution, given its appeal to notions of human flourishing and the common good on both religious and secular grounds, whether for the sake of human dignity, a communal bond that grants identity, or transcendent values. If efficiency is made the principal metric of what is valuable, then human labour and real communities risk becoming obsolete once robots become affordable substitutes.
The symposium invites reflections drawing on broadly-defined conservative traditions including ideas inspired by a canon running from Aristotle and Aquinas, through Burke, Oakeshott, Scruton, and Strauss, prompting a consideration of the relationship between work, leisure, and contemplation and how these dimensions might be reconfigured in an age of advanced automation. Rather than collapsing value into economic productivity, the conservative tradition has often insisted on respecting a plurality of goods, including the protection of the vulnerable, the dignity of labour, and the importance of non-instrumental forms of intellectual and moral activity.
By bringing together contributions from political theory, philosophy, sociology, and related fields, the symposium aims to develop a sustained reflection on whether conservatism can offer a coherent and critical response to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence in education, and what such a response reveals about the future of technologically mediated societies.
