The Handover by David Runciman

The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and AIs
By David Runciman
Liveright 2023

David Runciman is a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge. Nevermind that the publicity for his new book The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States, and Ais refers to him as “an eminent political thinker” – that’s standard publicity boilerplate and can be dismissed as such. No, the important thing is that David Runciman is a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge. Throughout The Handover, that bobs on the water as a kind of life buoy. 

Runciman’s central idea is that humanity’s current grapple with the implications of rapidly-complicating AI is only the latest iteration in a much longer struggle between individuals and the collective agencies they use in order to run the world, specifically two such agencies: states and corporations. Both can do things individual humans can’t do, and both have a tendency to work against the best interests of those individuals, so the comparison with AI, which Runciman calls “essential,” is intriguing, if obviously ill-fitting. It’s the kind of thought experiment that would make for interesting dinner conversation provided it isn’t pushed too far. 

Runciman immediately sets about pushing it too far, usually by overlooking the central flaw in the comparison: states and corporations are composed of human beings and can’t exist apart from them, whereas AI, as Runciman himself points out, increasingly exists independent of the humans who create it – often operating in ways those humans don’t fully understand. “For hundreds of years now we have been building artificial versions of ourselves, endowed with superhuman powers and designed to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations,” Runciman writes. “We made them for our own convenience, to allow us to lead safer, healthier, happier lives.” He’s referring here not to AI but to states and corporations, but states and corporations have never been artificial versions of people, and what corporation was ever created to make lives safer, healthier, and happier? States are shaped by power, and corporations are shaped by profit; no example of either ever came into being as a tool. 

But an over-strained central conceit is almost an occupational hazard in the age of TED talks. It need not sink a book unless there are more worrying aspects. 

Runciman’s book is full of more worrying aspects. He’s glib when he should be grim, dippy when he should be discerning. This can take minor forms, like his offhand reference to the Roman Empire having ruled “much of the known world.” And it it can sometimes take ridiculous forms. “One of our worries about AI is how our individuality might be crushed by algorithms taking decisions for us,” he writes, for instance. “Even if the machines don’t intend to silence us, those who control them still could: You might think that, but the computer says not, so be quiet.’” 

But sometimes things get much worse in the course of The Handover, with passages like this:

No two individual states or corporations are ever identical. Some thrive, some decay, and all must die eventually: organic imagery is still tempting to describe how they can either fail or flourish. Yet there appears to be a modern blueprint that can be applied successfully in wildly varying circumstances: Denmark and South Korea must have something in common to both be so prosperous, given how few other attributes they share.

This is startlingly stupid, and it’s lodged squarely in the course of a book that characterizes its author as an eminent political thinker. And it’s hardly isolated; by the time Runciman is edging around “the risk of making intelligence the benchmark of our politics,” surely many readers will feel justified in wondering if he’s getting a little side-money from some AI somewhere. 

By the time his book is meandering to its conclusion, it’s feeling so much like a TED talk that it’s not surprising to see references to pop-explainers like Yuval Harari. All that’s left is a send-off composed of what Daniel Dennett refers to as “deepities,” and Runciman is here to deliver:

If the state can make us safer, we might be able to make it smarter; if we can make it smarter, it might be able to keep us safer. When it goes wrong, however, it really goes wrong. We get stupider; the state gets more dangerous. We have to be ever-alert for that possibility.

If you can figure out what that possibility is for which you’re supposed to be ever-alert, The Handover might be the book for you. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.