In years to come there will be rapid development and widespread implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) into every aspect of human practice. This short article raises some ideas about what AI means for the individual.
Our body means we are an individual, at least until our brain understands that we are no longer part of our mother. Our unique self is complex and authentic. As we learn and our mind develops, our personal beliefs give us our own individual truth, reality, and sense of being.
Being an individual human being means connecting with other individuals, to learn and reflect on:
(1) what is real
(2) what we can trust
(3) how to respond or behave
(4) how to be ‘woke’ or do no harm
The individual matters for humanity. Our diversity, randomness, uncertainty (entropy) gives humans their strength. Our inclusion as individuals supports social cohesion. Our equality as individuals upholds moral codes.
To make sense of our individuality society attaches to us, superficial concepts, categories, and words. We perceive and mould our identity in response. Society finds faults and gaps in representation and struggles to know How to 'do' diversity in these narrow terms.
Dominant, yet superficial, hegemonies of the individual bleed into technology development and are recreated in the future. AI simplifies our diversity as individuals – this is its reality.
The new AI world will influence our understanding of what it means to be an individual person. In a good way people will be able to understand more about themselves at a deeper level. For example, their personal health profile. It will also be able to make some insightful predictions about likely future events for certain types of individuals, such as the risk of diseases.
AI will influence individual human behaviours as we adjust to greater levels of prediction, deeper levels of analysis, and the scale and speed of knowledge acquisition.
Some of these developments will be based on assumptions and generalisations about what is important to humans – for example being served quickly by a self-check-out system in a supermarket rather than valuing the human interaction with a cashier.
Beliefs about what is important to individuals will be ingrained in the types of technologies that are developed and the types of impact they have on people. Design justice may help to align new technologies with the most popular values, with room for some adjustment and flexibility.
Values made implicit through AI cannot align with every person’s unique set of values, which also change over time. Some people will find themselves in a moment where they do not feel they fit with what is being expected of them. Their self is at odds with what is perceived to be normal and correct.
But not every detail about the individual can be captured by data, observed, or measured. Individuals are more than the sum of their data and not even a person can fully know themselves or their own mind. An entirely material, data driven, way of looking at the world will limit AI – and cause harm if there is an assumption that what is predicted about the individual is the truth for the individual.
Some individuals will find that the approximation of themselves in data does not reflect who they are, is not who they are now, or who they might want to be. No matter how much data there is on a person is or how well-informed predictive analytics are, somethings cannot be known. Somethings will not ring true. Predictions are not truths unless they play out.
AI cannot be blamed for failing to know the individual, for the individual cannot fully know themselves. Whether or not AI has a human in the loop or a machine in the loop, the individual exists beyond the loop.
The problem of the anomalous individual in an AI world, is that individual is going to be you.