Governance and Agency
AI and Human Competencies: Imagination, Resolution and Agency
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Callum McEachern
The deployment of existing digital technologies is resulting in reactive governance and education policies across all social, cultural and political contexts. Closer analysis shows unexpected impacts on the learning and decision-making capacities of democratic citizens. In particular, how temporal and spatial factors are reshaping risk assessment, problem-solving and memory. This trans-disciplinary study explores the potential impact of AI on cognitive and emotional intelligence. Could AI weaken place-based relationships that generate diversity in knowledge, skills and values? Could deploying AI without robust citizen competencies, erode ownership of 'ends and means' and the realisation of human needs? How to revitalise the role of physical experience in developing critical, cooperative and creative competencies is discussed. Solutions to improve governance are also presented in models to strengthen community motivation, abilities and opportunities for learning and decision-making about AI.
AI and the Hyperinflation of Supremacy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Henry Hawkins
This paper examines the relationship between supremacist sociopolitical systems and AI, each of which has been developing along its own temporal trajectory. It fundamentally asks whether those trajectories are converging in the early twenty-first century, and if so, what consequences may result. Of particular interest is the problem of hyperinflation, whereby AI may supplant human cognition as supremacy’s propellant, thereby geometrically growing its structural influence. If this hyperinflation of supremacy is indeed on the horizon, this paper will suggest how social justice activism may likewise need to rapidly evolve in order to create future anti-supremacist countermeasures.
Artificial Intelligence and Probability as Techniques for Human Problem Solving
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas D. Barton
Human ingenuity has devised a variety of devices for resolving social problems, techniques that seemingly bear little in common. Among these varied methods are random selection; scientific investigation; markets; democracy; religious decree; contracts; and state enforced public norms (i.e., laws). Each distinct realm employs different methods for problem resolution, and produces outcomes in different forms. As each emerged historically, each carried powerful social or philosophical repercussions. Modernly, social problems migrate among these decisional realms with relatively little formality, planning, or even coherence. That spontaneity is not necessarily bad; like biodiversity, the uncoordinated differences among the problem solving techniques together make possible a more workable society than would emerge from exclusive reliance on fewer techniques. In recent years, two new devices have become highly significant to human problem solving: probability and artificial intelligence. Probability, though not new, has broadened and intensified with the ability to aggregate vast data sets electronically. Artificial intelligence, in the strong sense of machine self-learning, is similarly enabled by the explosion of information and computing power. I propose to examine probability and artificial intelligence as newly invented devices for problem solving. Each tool carries uniquely new qualities and capabilities; each may be projected to address problems within a certain range or with certain attributes, and to bear distinct social, moral, economic, and political consequences.
