Rereading Seeing Like a State in the AI era: behavioral cues won't scale for oversight
akbirthko · x · 2026-10-17
akbirthko jokes that Claude is "yapping" James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State to him, then revisits a take from 3.5 years ago — and mostly disavows it. We now have superhuman reasoners, genuinely plausible "superintelligence," and agent fleets burning titanic compute. His core argument: behavioral cues won't suffice for scalable oversight of centralized systems, while distributed ones self-correct through real-world (IRL) feedback.
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