What is the contribution that the arts and humanities can make to our engagement with the increasingly pervasive technology of artificial intelligence? My aim in this short article is to sketch some of these potential contributions.
Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of the arts and humanities is to make vivid the fact that the development of AI is not a matter of destiny, but instead involves successive waves of highly consequential human choices. It’s important to identify the choices, to frame them in the right way, and to raise the question: who gets to make them and how?
This is important because AI, and digital technology generally, has become the latest focus of the historicist myth that social evolution is preordained, that our social world is determined by independent variables over which we, as individuals or societies, are able to exert little control. So we either go with the flow, or go under. As Aristotle put it: ‘No one deliberates about things that are invariable, nor about things that it is impossible for him to do.’
Not long ago, processes of economic globalisation were being presented as invariable in this way until a populist backlash and then the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in. Today, it is technological developments that are portrayed in this deterministic fashion. An illustration of this trend is a recent speech by Tony Blair identifying the ‘21st-century technological revolution’ as defining the progressive task. As the political scientist Helen Thompson pointed out, technology has replaced globalisation in Blair’s rhetoric of historicist progressivism.
The humanities are vital to combatting this historicist tendency, which is profoundly disempowering for individuals and democratic publics alike. They can do so by reminding us, for example, of other technological developments that arose the day before yesterday – such as the harnessing of nuclear power – and how their development and deployment were always contingent on human choices, and therefore hostage to systems of value and to power structures that could have been otherwise.
Having highlighted the necessity for choice, the second contribution the arts and humanities can make is to emphasise the inescapability of Ethics in framing and thinking through these choices.
Ethics is inescapable because it concerns the ultimate values in which our choices are anchored, whether we realise it or not. These are values that define what it is to have a good life, and what we owe to others, including non-human animals and to nature. Therefore, all forms of ‘regulation’ that might be proposed for AI, whether one’s self-regulation in deciding whether to use a social robot to keep one’s aged mother company, or the content of the social and legal norms that should govern the use of such robots, ultimately implicate choices that reflect ethical judgments about salient values and their prioritisation.
The arts and humanities in general, and not just philosophy, engage directly with the question of ethics – the ultimate ends of human life. And, in the context of AI, it is vital for them to fight against a worrying contraction that the notion of ethics is apt to undergo. Thanks in part to the incursion of big tech into the AI ethics space, ‘ethics’ is often interpreted in an unduly diminished way. For example, as a form of soft, self-regulation lacking legal enforceability. Or, even more strangely, it is identified with a narrow sub-set of ethical values.
So, for example, in her recent book, Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford writes, ‘we must focus less on ethics and more on power’ because ‘AI is invariably designed to amplify and reproduce the forms of power it has been deployed to optimize’. But what would the recommended focus on power entail? Crawford tells us it would interrogate the power structures in which AI is embedded, in terms of ideas of equality, justice, and democracy.
