Three Damaging Ideas and AI in the Anthropocene

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering Nicolas Kosoy's lecture on the three damaging ideas—Anthropocentrism, Property, and the Economic Growth Imperative—and their intersections with artificial intelligence in the Anthropocene.

Platonic Anthropocentrism

The philosophical doctrine holding that the sensory world of change is an illusion and that true reality exists in a perfect, unchanging realm of forms that shapes our world; humans access this realm through cultivated reason, which must master and direct the passions.

Aristotelian Human Exceptionalism

Aristotle's assertion in 'Metaphysics' that nonhuman animals live merely by appearances and memories with little connected experience, whereas the human race uniquely lives also by art and reasoning.

Enlightenment Thought (17th and 18th Century)

An intellectual, cultural, and scientific revolution that re-evaluated knowledge, morals, humans, and God; elevated science and reason over myth and religion; established utilitarianism as a principal ethic; and conceptualized humans as self-interested maximizers.

Extrinsic Moral Value

An ethical framing found in human-centred AI ethics standards where nonhuman entities and ecosystems are considered to possess moral worth only to the extent that they serve human utility or interests.

Human-Centred AI Ethics Standards

AI ethical guidelines that prioritize human welfare over ecological integrity. According to Rigley et al. (2023), these anthropocentric approaches can permit environmental harms such as animal disturbance, ecosystem destabilization, landscape alteration, and massive energy consumption and emissions.

Non-Anthropocentric AI Ethics

An alternative framework recommended by Rigley et al. (2023) that overcomes the limitations of human-centred AI by extending moral concern directly to the wider nonhuman world across disciplines such as philosophy, political science, social robotics, and computer science.

Dario Amodei

AI researcher and executive who argued in 'We Must Pace the Frontier' (September 2026) that AI could cure most major diseases in 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create abundance and empowerment, and foster a renaissance of democracy and freedom.

Code of Hammurabi (in Property Law)

An early statutory legal framework that aligned property ownership with the rise of civilization, monetary trade, and formal state governance.

Private Property Regime

A property regime where an individual owner holds the rights to socially acceptable uses and asset control, while carrying the duty of avoiding socially unacceptable uses (Hanna et al., 1996).

Common Property Regime

A property regime owned by a collective group that holds the right to exclude non-owners and bears the duties of maintenance and constraining the rate of resource use (Hanna et al., 1996).

State Property Regime

A property regime owned by the state, giving the state the right to determine rules of resource access and use while obligating it to maintain social objectives (Hanna et al., 1996).

Open Access Regime

A resource condition characterized by no recognized owner, granting any party the right of capture while imposing no duties of stewardship or conservation (Hanna et al., 1996).

Bundles of Rights Associated with Positions

A property rights classification framework (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992; Bavinck et al., 2014) establishing a cumulative hierarchy of rights: Authorized Entrant (access only), Authorized User (access, withdrawal), Claimant (access, withdrawal, management), Proprietor (access, withdrawal, management, exclusion), and Owner (all previous rights plus alienation).

Right of Alienation

The highest-level right within the Schlager and Ostrom bundles of rights framework, possessed solely by an 'Owner,' permitting them to sell, lease, or permanently transfer the resource system or property.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

French political philosopher who in 1840 ('What is Property?') proclaimed that 'Property is robbery!', distinguishing exploitative property that generates income without work from legitimate 'possession' by small users who cultivate the land themselves.

Second Enclosure Movement

A concept identified by Boyle (2017) and applied to AI by Yang Yang (2026) describing a cognitive enclosure where corporations privatize data commons (social media interactions, open-access research) and monopolize computing commons (GPUs, cloud infrastructure).

Primitive Accumulation (AI Context)

Originally defined by Karl Marx (1867) as the violent separation of producers from the means of production, adapted in the digital AI era to describe the corporate enclosure of data and computing resources to extract value from digital labor while excluding marginalized actors.

Social Metabolism (1750–present)

The historical co-evolution of socio-economic trends (such as population growth, real GDP, water use, and transport) with Earth system trends (such as atmospheric $CO_2$, methane, surface temperature, and biosphere degradation) charting the Great Acceleration in the Anthropocene (Bai et al., 2016).

Executive Order on Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI

A US presidential executive order issued on January 23, 2025, whose Section 5 formally revoked the 2023 Executive Order 14,110 ('Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence').

Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL)

China's regulatory statute governing digital information, which is focused primarily on data privacy and lacks specific environmental recommendations or sustainability obligations for AI systems.

AI as a Bidirectional Productivity Amplifier

The concept investigated by Alpine et al. (2026) showing that productivity gains stimulated by AI across a global energy-economy model enable more total $CO_2$ emissions across economic sectors than they avoid.

PFAS (Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) in AI

Persistent toxic chemicals whose manufacturing and battery-grade fluoropolymer output are expanding worldwide by companies such as Arkema, Syensqo, Daikin, and Solstice to meet surging demand driven by microchip and semiconductor fabrication for AI.

Property-Right Hierarchy (Challen 2000)

A multi-layered governance model exemplified in an international fishery where decision-making scopes transition across multiple national governments (common property defining territorial waters), national governments (state property allocating regional rights), communities (common property distributing quotas), and individual fishermen (private property managing production and quota trading).