Constitutional Morality and the Emerging Social Imaginary of the Information Revolution

This essay argues that the information revolution is creating new social imaginary, a term defined by the philosopher, Charles Taylor, as referring to the way that social relations and expectations are commonly imagined in a society. AI today discovers social relations in graphs of networked knowledge too subtle for human beings to detect. It finds people and brings them together in dating sites and political factions, for example. And, it makes decisions by finding patterns that occur in graphs of human actions and preferences. This means it is creating a new social imaginary that includes a role for AI in understanding the patterns of human relation. The nature and scope of that new imaginary evident by considering how the foundational concepts of information technology challenge the traditional understanding of the American constitutional plan.