Bruce Schneier is my go-to expert on encryption and privacy. I value his expert knowledge and his takes alike. With Pinker, Chomsky, and the other thinkers on this site, he helps define my Weltanschauung.
I have read Data and Goliath, Liars and Outliers, and A Hacker’s Mind, and I could not agree more with them. The first shows surveillance as a business model. The second makes trust the basis of society. The third teaches thinking like a hacker, finding the loophole in any system of rules.
One passage in Liars and Outliers stands out. He walks through a day without a gun, body armor, or burglar alarm, and writes: “It’s what we call ‘trust.’ Actually, it’s what we call ‘civilization.’” That line cements him as an Enlightenment thinker.
On AI he is sober. Its powers are speed, scale, scope, and sophistication, and Rewiring Democracy asks whether they concentrate power or distribute it. An AI “will act trustworthy, but it will not be trustworthy”, he warns. The task is to make AIs trustworthy services, “agents and not double agents”. With Henry Farrell and Nathan Sanders he argues AI could moderate mass political conversation and summarize what citizens think. That is the hope in Slow by Design.
On the condition I agree with him. An AI built for shareholders will act trustworthy without being trustworthy, so the fix is AI built as a public good and regulated like one. Even frontier labs ask for rules. Sam Altman told the Senate in 2023 that “regulation of AI is essential”, which concedes part of his point. That condition sits well with mine, an AI aligned with us that has earned our trust, the mild Leviathan. I have found nothing of his to disagree with yet.