scholarly journals The social turn of artificial intelligence

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nello Cristianini ◽  
Teresa Scantamburlo ◽  
James Ladyman

AbstractSocial machines are systems formed by material and human elements interacting in a structured way. The use of digital platforms as mediators allows large numbers of humans to participate in such machines, which have interconnected AI and human components operating as a single system capable of highly sophisticated behaviour. Under certain conditions, such systems can be understood as autonomous goal-driven agents. Many popular online platforms can be regarded as instances of this class of agent. We argue that autonomous social machines provide a new paradigm for the design of intelligent systems, marking a new phase in AI. After describing the characteristics of goal-driven social machines, we discuss the consequences of their adoption, for the practice of artificial intelligence as well as for its regulation.

Author(s):  
Christian List

AbstractThe aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical.


‘Social implications' generally refers to anything that affects an individual, a community, and wider society. The social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) is an immensely important field of study since AI technology will steadily continue to permeate other technologies and, inevitably, our society as a whole. Many of the social implications of this technological process are non-obvious and surprising. We should ask ourselves, What type of society do we want and what role will AI play to influence and shape lives? Will people simply become consumers served by intelligent systems that respond to our every whim? Are we reaching a tipping point between convenience and dependency? How will AI affect social issues relating to housing, finance, privacy, poverty, and so on? Do we want a society where machines are supplementing (or augmenting) humans or perhaps even substituting humans? It is important to be as clear as possible about likely social implications of AI if it truly helps benefit individuals and society.


Author(s):  
T.V. Karlova ◽  
◽  
A.Yu. Bekmeshov ◽  
E.A. Kirillova ◽  
Tingwei He ◽  
...  

The article highlights issues related to the transition of Chinese organizations to digital technologies during the crisis period of the pandemic. The article deals with the development of digital platforms in education, medicine and business.The research examines the development of online platforms conducted by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Tencent and Alibaba. Special attention is paid to the development of the protection of the population from viral infections on a corporate basis.In addition, questions on the latest developments of virtual technologies in the higher education system in China are considered. Special difficulties of functioning in the period of a pandemic in the organizations of tourist and logistics directions are designated.


2021 ◽  
pp. 11-25
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Tigard

AbstractTechnological innovations in healthcare, perhaps now more than ever, are posing decisive opportunities for improvements in diagnostics, treatment, and overall quality of life. The use of artificial intelligence and big data processing, in particular, stands to revolutionize healthcare systems as we once knew them. But what effect do these technologies have on human agency and moral responsibility in healthcare? How can patients, practitioners, and the general public best respond to potential obscurities in responsibility? In this paper, I investigate the social and ethical challenges arising with newfound medical technologies, specifically the ways in which artificially intelligent systems may be threatening moral responsibility in the delivery of healthcare. I argue that if our ability to locate responsibility becomes threatened, we are left with a difficult choice of trade-offs. In short, it might seem that we should exercise extreme caution or even restraint in our use of state-of-the-art systems, but thereby lose out on such benefits as improved quality of care. Alternatively, we could embrace novel healthcare technologies but in doing so we might need to loosen our commitment to locating moral responsibility when patients come to harm; for even if harms are fewer – say, as a result of data-driven diagnostics – it may be unclear who or what is responsible when things go wrong. What is clear, at least, is that the shift toward artificial intelligence and big data calls for significant revisions in expectations on how, if at all, we might locate notions of responsibility in emerging models of healthcare.


Author(s):  
Fariba Sadri ◽  
Kostas Stathis

In recent years much research and development effort has been directed towards the broad field of ambient intelligence (AmI), and this trend is set to continue for the foreseeable future. AmI aims at seamlessly integrating services within smart infrastructures to be used at home, at work, in the car, on the move, and generally in most environments inhabited by people. It is a relatively new paradigm rooted in ubiquitous computing, which calls for the integration and convergence of multiple disciplines, such as sensor networks, portable devices, intelligent systems, humancomputer and social interactions, as well as many techniques within artificial intelligence, such as planning, contextual reasoning, speech recognition, language translation, learning, adaptability and temporal and hypothetical reasoning. The term AmI was coined by the European Commission, when in 2001 one of its Programme Advisory Groups launched the AmI challenge (Ducatel et al., 2001), later updated in 2003 (Ducatel et al., 2003). But although the term AmI originated from Europe, the goals of the work have been adopted worldwide, see for example (The Aware Home, 2007), (The Oxygen Project, 2007), and (The Sony Interaction Lab, 2007). The foundations of AmI infrastructures are based on the impressive progress we are witnessing in wireless technologies, sensor networks, display capabilities, processing speeds and mobile services. These developments help provide much useful (row) information for AmI applications. Further progress is needed in taking full advantage of such information in order to provide the degree of intelligence, flexibility and naturalness envisaged. This is where artificial intelligence and multi-agent techniques have important roles to play. In this paper we will review the progress that has been made in intelligent systems, discuss the role of artificial intelligence and agent technologies and focus on the application of AmI for independent living.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (12) ◽  
pp. 1601-1625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Leonardi ◽  
Jeffrey W. Treem

The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral visibility should be a central concern for scholars of organizing. We attempt to set the cornerstones for the study of behavioral visibility by considering the social and technological contexts that are enabling behavioral visibility, developing the concept of behavioral visibility by defining its various components, considering the conditions through which it is commonly produced, and outlining potential consequences of behavioral visibility in the form of three paradoxes. We conclude with some conjectures about the kinds of research questions, empirical foci, and methodological strategies that scholars will need to embrace in order to understand how behavioral visibility shapes and is shaped by the process of organizing as we catapult, swiftly, into an era where artificial intelligence, learning algorithms, and social tools are changing the way people work.


Author(s):  
Fariba Sadri ◽  
Kostas Stathis

In recent years much research and development effort has been directed towards the broad field of ambient intelligence (AmI), and this trend is set to continue for the foreseeable future. AmI aims at seamlessly integrating services within smart infrastructures to be used at home, at work, in the car, on the move, and generally in most environments inhabited by people. It is a relatively new paradigm rooted in ubiquitous computing, which calls for the integration and convergence of multiple disciplines, such as sensor networks, portable devices, intelligent systems, human-computer and social interactions, as well as many techniques within artificial intelligence, such as planning, contextual reasoning, speech recognition, language translation, learning, adaptability, and temporal and hypothetical reasoning. The term AmI was coined by the European Commission, when in 2001 one of its Programme Advisory Groups launched the AmI challenge (Ducatel et al., 2001), later updated in 2003 (Ducatel et al., 2003). But although the term AmI originated from Europe, the goals of the work have been adopted worldwide, see for example (The Aware Home, 2007), (The Oxygen Project, 2007), and (The Sony Interaction Lab, 2007). The foundations of AmI infrastructures are based on the impressive progress we are witnessing in wireless technologies, sensor networks, display capabilities, processing speeds and mobile services. These developments help provide much useful (row) information for AmI applications. Further progress is needed in taking full advantage of such information in order to provide the degree of intelligence, flexibility and naturalness envisaged. This is where artificial intelligence and multi-agent techniques have important roles to play. In this paper we will review the progress that has been made in intelligent systems, discuss the role of artificial intelligence and agent technologies and focus on the application of AmI for independent living.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-33
Author(s):  
Tor Anders Bye

The Platform Society sets out to understand the role that many of the new digital platforms of our time have come to play in public life and societal organization, and how they have altered (or attempted to alter) social practices and institutions within the countries in which they operate. In the book’s introductory paragraph, the authors – José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal – point to terms like “the sharing economy”, “the platform revolution”, and “the gig economy” as attempts to describe the social change that have taken place over the past three decades alongside the transformation of the internet. It is an explicit ambition of the book to examine what role online platforms play in the organization of public values in both American and western European societies, as well as the issue of how public values can be forced upon the ecosystem that these platforms make up between them.


Author(s):  
M. G. Koliada ◽  
T. I. Bugayova

The article discusses the history of the development of the problem of using artificial intelligence systems in education and pedagogic. Two directions of its development are shown: “Computational Pedagogic” and “Educational Data Mining”, in which poorly studied aspects of the internal mechanisms of functioning of artificial intelligence systems in this field of activity are revealed. The main task is a problem of interface of a kernel of the system with blocks of pedagogical and thematic databases, as well as with the blocks of pedagogical diagnostics of a student and a teacher. The role of the pedagogical diagnosis as evident reflection of the complex influence of factors and reasons is shown. It provides the intelligent system with operative and reliable information on how various reasons intertwine in the interaction, which of them are dangerous at present, where recession of characteristics of efficiency is planned. All components of the teaching and educational system are subject to diagnosis; without it, it is impossible to own any pedagogical situation optimum. The means in obtaining information about students, as well as the “mechanisms” of work of intelligent systems based on innovative ideas of advanced pedagogical experience in diagnostics of the professionalism of a teacher, are considered. Ways of realization of skill of the teacher on the basis of the ideas developed by the American scientists are shown. Among them, the approaches of researchers D. Rajonz and U. Bronfenbrenner who put at the forefront the teacher’s attitude towards students, their views, intellectual and emotional characteristics are allocated. An assessment of the teacher’s work according to N. Flanders’s system, in the form of the so-called “The Interaction Analysis”, through the mechanism of fixing such elements as: the verbal behavior of the teacher, events at the lesson and their sequence is also proposed. A system for assessing the professionalism of a teacher according to B. O. Smith and M. O. Meux is examined — through the study of the logic of teaching, using logical operations at the lesson. Samples of forms of external communication of the intellectual system with the learning environment are given. It is indicated that the conclusion of the found productive solutions can have the most acceptable and comfortable form both for students and for the teacher in the form of three approaches. The first shows that artificial intelligence in this area can be represented in the form of robotized being in the shape of a person; the second indicates that it is enough to confine oneself only to specially organized input-output systems for targeted transmission of effective methodological recommendations and instructions to both students and teachers; the third demonstrates that life will force one to come up with completely new hybrid forms of interaction between both sides in the form of interactive educational environments, to some extent resembling the educational spaces of virtual reality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
György Kovács ◽  
Rabab Benotsmane ◽  
László Dudás

Recent tendencies – such as the life-cycles of products are shorter while consumers require more complex and more unique final products – poses many challenges to the production. The industrial sector is going through a paradigm shift. The traditional centrally controlled production processes will be replaced by decentralized control, which is built on the self-regulating ability of intelligent machines, products and workpieces that communicate with each other continuously. This new paradigm known as Industry 4.0. This conception is the introduction of digital network-linked intelligent systems, in which machines and products will communicate to one another in order to establish smart factories in which self-regulating production will be established. In this article, at first the essence, main goals and basic elements of Industry 4.0 conception is described. After it the autonomous systems are introduced which are based on multi agent systems. These systems include the collaborating robots via artificial intelligence which is an essential element of Industry 4.0.


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