Social Theory and Artificial Intelligence: Key Challenges

Straddling a middle ground between apocalyptic and ecstatic accounts of an AI-dominated future, we discuss five possible challenges posed by artificial intelligence for humanity today. These challenges are by no means new, but AI has the potential to intensify them in unprecedented fashion. Firstly, AI possibly compromises notions of human agency and freedom as we have traditionally known them due of its potential to monitor, nudge and guide people’s behaviour, thereby enabling various actors (ranging from the state to possibly the AI-model itself) to limit the scope for the individual to deviate from specific norms. Secondly, AI complicates issues around authorship and ownership of intellectual and artistic products, further eroding the erstwhile primacy and fixity of the human subject as creative force. Thirdly, AI poses further challenges for distinguishing what is real and unreal, possibly leading to a state whereby individuals learn to live with and accept the uncertainties of that distinction. Fourthly, AI poses new challenges for the maintenance of our mental and cognitive agility, enabling as it does for us to rely on technologies to fulfil functions that otherwise would have required our own intellectual input. Fifthly, given the uncertainty as to the potential of this technology, especially its destructive potential, questions arise as to how to deal with the AI-research itself, what its current value is, whether to pause that research, and so on.