Question 1

What is Chapter 14 of Seth & Noēsis about?

Accepted Answer

Power, and who shapes whom. On a terrace on Montjuic Seth realizes he had been losing power games he did not know he was in, and rereads Robert Greene's 48 Laws through AI. With Ivan Illich he asks whether a tool leaves the skill with you or rebuilds your life around needing it. The chapter then turns to the fear of being replaced, the governance of AI and the commons, and ends with termites and a cathedral nobody designed.

Question 2

Does AI make people worse at their work?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes, and the studies in the chapter say when. In the Harvard and BCG study of 758 consultants using GPT-4, work inside the AI's frontier was rated about 40 percent higher in quality, and outside it consultants were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those without AI. In Bastani and colleagues' study of about a thousand high-school students, an AI that gave answers left students 17 percent behind on the exam without it, while a tutor that gave hints avoided that loss. The variable was how the interaction was designed.

Question 3

What is stigmergy, and why does the chapter call it a cathedral nobody designed?

Accepted Answer

Stigmergy is Pierre-Paul Grassé's word, from 1959, for coordination through traces left in a shared medium. Termites modify their surroundings and the next termite responds to the change, so a mound that regulates its own temperature gets built with no blueprint and no leader. Seth and Noēsis use it for a form of power that belongs to nobody: AlphaFold's released structures changed the ground biologists stand on, and a chapter might change the environment a reader thinks inside.