Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Who they are

The Oxford Internet Institute lists him as Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation and describes him as one of the three statutory professors at the institute. In the acknowledgments of Guardrails (page 194) he thanks his students in the "Law & Internet" course at the University of Oxford and his Oxford college, Keble.

This page records only what institutional pages and the book state. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI (2024), with Gasser.** The book treats society's influence on individual decisions as a set of guardrails, which it defines at page 10 as "the 'system' around a naked norm, the processes and institutions, that makes guardrails work." At page 3, guardrails "show you where the edge is, making it less likely that you'll step over without meaning to. But they aren't like prison walls." The constructive core is chapter 6 (pages 100 to 121): guardrails should empower individuals, be anchored in social processes and encourage learning. Chapter 4 argues that if machines learn from decisions that machines recommended, variety drains out of the training data, and it proposes decision variability as a quality worth protecting.

Key ideas

The book's central commitment is to human agency. Its authors argue that good guardrails empower rather than supplant the person deciding, and they state plainly at page 120 that this commitment is "not value-neutral". At page 109 they concede that "there is no guarantee that well-intended measures to enable decisions will lead to successful outcomes."

In medicine the principle maps onto the question of how far AI should inform rather than make clinical decisions. Studies of automation bias and deskilling suggest the human role has to be designed with care if it is to improve outcomes, a point the book's own concession anticipates.

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