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Towards a Sociological Conception of Artificial Intelligence

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Artificial General Intelligence (AGI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10999))

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Abstract

Social sciences have been always formed and influenced by the development of society, adjusting the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical frameworks to emerging social phenomena. In recent years, with the leap in the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of its everyday applications, “non-human intelligent actors” are increasingly becoming part of the society. This is manifested in the evolving realms of smart home systems, autonomous vehicles, chatbots, intelligent public displays, etc. In this paper, we present a prospective research project that takes one of the pioneering steps towards establishing a “distinctively sociological” conception of AI. Its first objective is to extract the existing conceptions of AI as perceived by its technological developers and (possibly differently) by its users. In the second part, capitalizing on a set of interviews with experts from social science domains, we will explore the new imaginable conceptions of AI that do not originate from its technological possibilities but rather from societal necessities. The current formal ways of defining AI are grounded in the technological possibilities, namely machine learning methods and neural network models. But what exactly is AI as a social phenomenon, which may act on its own, can be blamed responsible for ethically problematic behavior, or even endanger people’s employment? We argue that such conceptual investigation is a crucial step for further empirical studies of phenomena related to AI’s position in current societies, but also will open up ways for critiques of new technological advancements with social consequences in mind from the outset.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXq-5L2ghhg.

  2. 2.

    Our arguments to consider only the currently employed Machine Learning and Neural Network algorithms rather than Agent-Based and BDI systems in the sociological conceptions of AI are based on the predominant proliferation of the former methods in intelligent applications which users often interact with.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Charles University, Nám. Jana Palacha 2, 116 38, Praha, Czech Republic

    Jakub Mlynář

  2. University of Fribourg, Boulevard de Pérolles 90, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Jakub Mlynář, Hamed S. Alavi & Himanshu Verma

  3. University College London, 66-72 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6EA, UK

    Hamed S. Alavi

  4. University of Lugano, Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, 6900, Lugano, Switzerland

    Lorenzo Cantoni

Authors
  1. Jakub Mlynář
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  2. Hamed S. Alavi
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  3. Himanshu Verma
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  4. Lorenzo Cantoni
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jakub Mlynář .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Adams State University, Alamosa, Colorado, USA

    Matthew Iklé

  2. Odessa Competence Center for Artificial Intelligence (OCCAM), Odessa, Ukraine

    Arthur Franz

  3. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

    Rafal Rzepka

  4. SingularityNET; OpenCog; Hanson Robotics, Hong Kong, China

    Ben Goertzel

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Mlynář, J., Alavi, H.S., Verma, H., Cantoni, L. (2018). Towards a Sociological Conception of Artificial Intelligence. In: Iklé, M., Franz, A., Rzepka, R., Goertzel, B. (eds) Artificial General Intelligence. AGI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97676-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97676-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97675-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97676-1

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