Toward AI-embedded Society where AI is Not Recognized as AI

(Diary of an Old AI Researcher who is still Programming)

1 March 2019

I have written an invited paper titled `Toward AI-embedded Society where AI is Not Recognized as AI', in Journal of Information and Communications Policy (in Japanese).

Following is a brief English summary of this paper.

Koichi Hori: Toward AI-embedded Society where AI is Not Recognized as AI, Journal of Information and Communications Policy, Vol.2, No.1, 2018. (in Japanese)

In this paper, I first discuss what AI is.
Many people think that AI is some `thing' to replace a person. However, in reality, AI systems are not things to replace persons but are many types of functions to be embedded ubiquitously and invisibly in the society.

Then I argue that the boundary between humans and machines will be blurred. In every aspect of life, the functions of humans and the functions of machines will be mixed and will form complex systems. Hence, it will become difficult, for example, to articulate the causes of some outcome.

The blurred boundary between humans and machines leads to the problem of redefining important concepts in human society.
When a person may behave induced by smart nudges embedded in the society, to what extent can we say that he/she behaved based on his/her own free will? If a person behaves partially based on his/her free will and partially induced by smart machines around him/her, how will or will not the concept of responsibility change?
I argue that many important concepts of human society will be forced to be `liquefied', meaning that the extension of each concept will not be fixed but dynamically changed.
The concepts that may be liquefied are `tool', `actor and actee of moral act', `free will of autonomous individual', `responsibility', `accountability', `rights', and so on.

Fortunately, many philosophers and jurists are already discussing the problem of possible changes of important concepts of human society. We, artificial intelligence researchers, should collaborate with those experts in humanities. We should not only study the concept changes in human society but also should change AI design according to the change of the concepts in humanities. That is, AI will cause the change of the concepts in humanities, and the change of the concepts in humanities will cause the change of AI design; and this cycle should continue.

For the moment, how can we change the design of AI?
For example, if the concept of responsibility cannot be limited in humans and can be liquefied and distributed among the networked humans and machines, we should, perhaps, design new machines to observe and identify the distribution. This means that we should develop AI systems to solve the problems caused by AI systems. The authors are now working on these new AI systems.

© 2019 Koichi Hori