A century ago, John Dewey observed that '[s]team and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time'. In the last few decades, computing technologies have had a similar effect. Political philosophy's central task is to help us decide how to live together, by analysing our social relations, diagnosing their failings, and articulating ideals to guide their revision. But these profound social changes have left scarcely a dent in the model of social relations that (analytical) political philosophers assume. This essay aims to reverse that trend. It first builds a model of our novel social relations as they are now, and as they are likely to evolved, and then explores how those differences affect our theories of how to live together. I introduce the 'Algorithmic City', the network of algorithmically-mediated social relations, then characterise the intermediary power by which it is governed. I show how algorithmic governance raises new challenges for political philosophy concerning the justification of authority, the foundations of procedural legitimacy, and the possibility of justificatory neutrality.

Forthcoming in Collaborative Intelligence: How Humans and AI are Transforming our World, Arathi Sethumadhavan and Mira Lane (eds.), Seth Lazar, Australian National University Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own-- not because it has a will but because man has not. Introduction As rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and the rise of some of history's most potent corporations meet the diminished neoliberal state, people are increasingly subject to power exercised by means of automated systems. Machine learning, big data, and related computational technologies now underpin vital government services from criminal justice to tax auditing, public health to social services, immigration to defence (Citron, 2008; Calo and Citron, 2020; Engstrom et al., 2020). Google and Amazon connect consumers and producers in new algorithmic markets (Nadler and Cicilline, 2020). Google's search algorithm--and possibly in the near future OpenAI's GPT-4 or another large language model--determines, for many, how they find out about everything from how to vote to where to get vaccinated. Meta, Twitter, TikTok, Google and others algorithmically decide whose speech is amplified, reduced, or restricted (Vaidhyanathan, 2011; Pasquale, 2015; Gillespie, 2018; Suzor, 2019). And a new wave of products based on rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to further transform our economic and political lives. Automatic Authorities are automated computational systems used to exercise power over us by substantially determining what we may know, what we may have, and what our options will be. This chapter is based on, and substantially revises, my'Power and AI: Nature and Justification', in the Oxford Handbook of AI Governance (Justin Bullock et al., eds). My thanks to the publisher for their permission to use this material. But what normative lessons should we draw from these analyses? Power is everywhere, and is not necessarily bad.