A Copernican Revolution in Seeing Social Paradoxes
The so-called counter-productivity arguments have been made about schools, health care, and high-speed transportation; here we apply them to the subject of AI and social intelligence, testing hypotheses such as AI making people's intelligence more heteronomous and less autonomous, or people's behavior being controlled as a result of delegating decision-making to AI.
In the discussion of counter-productivity, von Foerster's conjecture is cited to describe the concern that individuals will become “trivial machines”. From a sociological standpoint, however, the view that individuals are connected to each other or that individuals constitute society is too naive.
To convert the counter-productivity argument, which is based on cybernetics ideas of autonomy /heteronomy and control, into a more sociological form of consideration, it is useful to take the perspective of sociocybernetics, which takes communication system (social system) as an “observer,” and it will be useful to ask what the blind spots in the “observation” are.