The Culture of AI

Everyday Life and the Digital Revolution

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138230057
• eBook ISBN: 9781315387161
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this ground-breaking book, Cambridge-trained sociologist Anthony Elliott argues that much of what passes for conventional wisdom about artificial intelligence is either ill-considered or plain wrong. The reason? The AI revolution is not so much about cyborgs and super-robots in the future, but rather massive changes in the here-and-now of everyday life.

In The Culture of AI, Elliott explores how intelligent machines, advanced robotics, accelerating automation, big data and the Internet of Everything impact upon day-to-day life and contemporary societies. With remarkable clarity and insight, Elliott's examination of the reordering of everyday life highlights the centrality of AI to everything we do – from receiving Amazon recommendations to requesting Uber, and from getting information from virtual personal assistants to talking with chatbots.

The rise of intelligent machines transforms the global economy and threatens jobs, but equally there are other major challenges to contemporary societies – although these challenges are unfolding in complex and uneven ways across the globe. The Culture of AI explores technological innovations from industrial robots to softbots, and from self-driving cars to military drones – and along the way provides detailed treatments of:

• The history of AI and the advent of the digital universe;
• automated technology, jobs and employment;
• the self and private life in times of accelerating machine intelligence;
• AI and new forms of social interaction;
• automated vehicles and new warfare;
• and, the future of AI.

Written by one of the world's foremost social theorists, The Culture of AI is a major contribution to the field and a provocative reflection on one of the most urgent issues of our time. It will be essential reading to those working in a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, science and technology studies, politics, and cultural studies.

1
The digital universe

Zoe Flood, a well-known journalist writing in The Guardian, recently summed up advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) thus: “Some are killing machines. Others are pesky passions of the weekend hobbyist. As such, drones have not always been welcomed in our skies”.¹ A critical observer might say that drones are all this and much more, especially since many people are increasingly held in thrall to those UAVs deployed in the service of the retail and service sectors.² All sorts of contradictions and ambiguities can be at identified in this respect. The very same people who protest about the militarization of drones may also want to order books through Amazon, which plans future dispatches by UAVs. Drones not only have noxious uses but promote the dehumanization of bodies into targets – for identification in service delivery, for remote monitoring in surveillance, and for destruction in war. There has also been growing public concern where drones have flown near commercial planes at airports worldwide, and in 2017 a Canadian charter skyjet was hit by a drone (without incident) as it prepared to land at Quebec City’s Jean Lesage International Airport.³

The social impact of drones has to be understood against a wide institutional backdrop. UAVs, for example, have the potential to radically diminish barriers to access for countless medical services and critical medicines to save lives, and on a scale not previously realizable.⁴ This is a socio-technological development with major global significance, and one that is radically transforming underdeveloped countries too. Consider the following example. In Rwanda, where travel between towns and villages in the rainy season is particularly fraught with danger, drones are now in use to deliver blood, vaccines and other urgent supplies to provide nationwide delivery of medical services.⁵ The Rwandan government signed a contract with Zipline, a California-based robotics company, for fixed-wing drones to deliver medical essentials to rural health facilities across its landlocked state. In 2016, the Rwandan government also announced the location for the world’s first droneport, designed by celebrated British architect Norman Foster.⁶ It is envisioned that various robotics start-up companies will develop services operating across a national network of droneports in Rwanda. Most significantly, the Rwandan droneport is not an isolated development. Drones are increasingly in use, both commercial and otherwise, in many other countries. In South Africa, Peru, Guyana, Papua New Guinea and the Dominican Republic, UAVs are being used for health deliveries and other humanitarian emergencies. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN has deployed drones as part of their general peacekeeping program. And in the rich North, UAV advocates argue that drones will soon become mainstream in potential commercial uses from retail delivery to medical supplies, and from building construction analysis to infrastructure inspection.

But there are other consequences too, and many involve huge risks. Advances in machine-learning algorithms for the guiding of military drone programs is one powerful indication of how new technology contributes to the perpetration of violence and war. The United States, for example, has used unmanned drones to attack militants in Pakistan and Afghanistan; however, the very same U.S. drone program has killed thousands of innocent people, having wrongly targeted numerous innocent civilians, according to some reports.⁷ And then there is the case of a new drone which French and British military contractors have developed for use by the Royal Air Force, with autonomous capabilities for selecting and engaging targets using AI. This is the Taranis drone, named after the Celtic god of thunder. The financial investment in the development of this unmanned combat system, which aims to provide autonomous drones by 2030, is estimated at over $US2 billion. Under current international law, autonomous combat systems such as military drones require human operators to fire on targets.⁸ But whether military violence or war could be conducted entirely by machines remains an open possibility, and the production of drones such as Taranis suggests that autonomous military drones might become a reality in the future. Certainly, the possibility of fully autonomous weapons systems is a topic of great debate, and with huge implications for global politics, military defence and humanitarian issues.

On the face of it, AI-based drones are contested and saturated with different socio-economic interests, and this is perhaps nowhere more evident than in relation to military drones. There are serious concerns about the kinds of threats autonomous combat systems might pose to the future of humanity. But at this point we need to recognize that the rise of AI in society is double-edged. There is no easy way in advance of identifying how new technologies based on autonomous systems and adaptation to the environment will play out. There are certainly some stunning opportunities, with the potential to drastically reduce poverty, disease and war. But so too the risks are enormous, and this can be clearly discerned from the IT arms race, the development of autonomous weapons systems and other fundamental threats. Moreover, the assessment of risk here must involve not only direct but also indirect threats. An example of the latter kind of high-consequence risk is that of insurgent groups tapping into communication satellites and aerial drone camera feeds in order to hack into military drones.

In this opening chapter, I shall not offer an analysis of the opportunities and risks arising in relation to social and technological systems. Instead, I focus on the complex systems which power and sustain digital life itself. I begin with the complexity debate and consider how new technologies are folded into social relations, ranging from smart grids and cloud infrastructures to the legions of algorithms, sensors and robots that infuse everyday life. I shall concentrate my attention on trying to define the distinctive characteristics of complex digital systems, both as key to the production of our professional and personal lives and as integral to the world’s future as a whole. I shall then look at some innovative attempts to conceptualize emergent intersections between technology and society – not only computational forms, but also developments in AI and robotics. I argue that the development of digital life creates new forms of action, interaction and social structure which depend upon the performance of digital identities on the one hand and the reproduction and transformation of digital systems on the other. In outlining and drawing upon various traditions of contemporary social and cultural theory, I contend that transformations in complex digital systems (mobile apps, bots, technological automation, smart cities, the Internet of Things) occur at the intersection where ways of life and digital skills become deeply layered as everyday occurrences.

Complex digital systems

The flow of human action and the production of cultural practices takes place today in the context of complex, powerful technological and social systems that stretch across time and space. In speaking of the systematic properties of technology and society, I mean their ordering features, giving a certain degree of ‘solidity’ to social practices which are self-organizing, adaptive and evolving. From this angle, technical and social systems are by definition emergent, dynamic and open. Yet such systems are never ‘solid’ in the sense that they are stable or unchanging. Complex technological and social systems, including the conditions of systems reproduction, are characterized by unpredictability, non-linearity and reversal. The ordering and reordering of systems, structures and networks, as developed in complexity theory, is highly dynamic, processual and unpredictable; the impact of positive and negative feedback loops shift systems away from states of equilibrium.⁹ Drawing from advances in complexity theory, historical sociology and social theory, I shall argue that a grounded, theoretically informed account of the digitization of technological and social systems must be based on seven sets of considerations. These complex, overlapping connections between technological systems and digital life can be analyzed and critiqued from the sociological considerations I now detail.

First, there is the sheer scale of systems of digitization, of technological automation and of social relations threaded through artificial intelligence – all being key global enablers of the digital data economy. Over 3 billion people – almost half the world’s population – are online, and digital interactions increasingly impact upon even those who find themselves with limited digital resources.¹⁰ Complex computerized systems of digitization make possible (and are increasingly interwoven with) the production and performance of social life – of business, leisure, consumerism, travel, governance and so on. These systems – of computing databases, codes of software, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RFID, GPS and other technologies – make possible our everyday networked interactions, from search engine enquiries to online shopping to social media. These systems facilitate predictable and relatively routine pathways of digitization which underpin smartphone social interactions, online banking, music streaming, status updates, blogs, vlogs and related actions of searching, retrieval and tagging spawned by the Internet. Systems of digitization enable repetition. In the contemporary world of digital life, these systems include social media, CCTV, credit cards, laptops, tablets, wearable computers, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), smartphones, email, SMS, satellites, computer algorithms, location tagging and so on. The complex, interdependent systems of digitization flourishing today are the “flow architectures” that increasingly order and reorder social relations, production, consumption, communications, travel and transport, and surveillance around the world.¹¹

In addition to the rapid spread of systems of digitalization, the scaling up of robotics is hugely significant throughout much of the world. Industrial robots transforming manufacturing – from packaging and testing to assembling minute electronics – are the fastest growing source of robotic technologies. From the early 1960s when one of the first industrial robots was operationalized in a candy factory in Ontario through to the 2010s where new technologies facilitated robots working hand-in-hand with workers, there has been a growing expansion in robotics and the number of published patents on robotics technology. The number of industrial robots in the USA jumped from 200 in 1970 to 5,500 in 1981 to 90,000 in 2001.¹² In 2015, the number of industrial robots sold worldwide was nearly 250,000; industrial robotics is an industry which annually enjoys global growth of approximately 10%. Automotive and electronics have been the major industry sectors for robotics use, but many other sectors are increasingly adopting robotics and technological automation. Robotics coupled with converging mobile technologies are especially transforming industry in Asia, which has dominated the ramp-up of robotics use, with China being the primary contributor. But demand for greater productivity, mass customization, miniaturization and shorter product life cycles has also driven growth for robotics worldwide, especially in Japan, Germany, Korea and the USA.

Second, digital systems should not be viewed as simply products of the contemporary but in part depend upon technological systems which have developed at earlier historical periods. “Many old technologies”, writes John Urry, “do not simply disappear but survive through path-dependent relationships, combining with the ‘new’ in a reconfigured and unpredicted cluster. An interesting example of this has been the enduring importance of the ‘technology’ of paper even within ‘high-tech’ offices”.¹³ Thus, the development and exploitation of digital technologies are interwoven in complex ways with multiple pre-digital technological systems. Another way of putting this point is to say that our wireless world is interdependent with a range of wired technologies. Many of the wired technologies – the wires, cables and connections of pre-digital systems – which intersect with digital technologies of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and RFID date from the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. There occurred in this historical period an astonishing range of experiments with systems of electrical energy for the purposes of communication. Systems dating from that period based upon the communication potential of electricity include electromagnetic telegraphy (which was trialled in England, Germany and the United States in the 1830s), the first viable telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore (constructed by Morse in 1843 with funds from the US Congress), the successful laying of early submarine cables across the English Channel and between England and Ireland in 1851–2 (with a transatlantic cable successfully laid the following decade), and the discovery of the electric voice-operated telephone (demonstrated in 1854 by Antonio Mecucci in New York), although it was some decades later that Alexander Graham Bell conceived the idea for the telephone as a communication system.¹⁴

Subsequent to this period, the twentieth century witnessed a vast array of technological systems emerge and develop. Broadcasting systems – radio from the 1920s, television from the 1940s – were pervasive and hugely consequential for social transformations associated with mass communications. In the 1960s, the launching of the world’s first geo-stationary communications satellites spelt the arrival of near-instantaneous communication on a global level. Around this time, other technological systems – from personal computing to mobile telephony – underwent early development too. The interlinked, tangled dynamics of these ‘systems’, of which most people are largely unaware as they go about their everyday social activities, is of key importance. Individuals will not necessarily know, or entertain awareness of, the conditions, scale or impact of such complex systems since these different technologies fuse and enrich each other.

Third, whilst the emergence of complex communication networks coincided with the advent of industrialization, it was only in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century that digital communication technologies and networks were systematically established on a global scale. In this connection, the exceptional significance of various technological transitions that occurred between 1989 and 2007 should be underscored. While digital technologies have progressively developed across time, 1989 is a key moment in the constitution of digital life. For this was the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web through the technological innovations of URL, HTML and HTTP. (The Web did not become readily accessible to people, however, until 1994). 1989 is also significant because Soviet Communism collapsed. According to Manuel Castells, this occurred because of Russia’s failure to develop new information technologies.¹⁵ Also, in this year, global financial markets were increasingly integrated through instantaneous communications and online real-time trading. Also, mobile telephony was launched, initially through Nokia and Vodafone, through the breakthroughs of GSM (global system for mobile communications). In 1991, the first GSM phone call was made with a Nokia device through the Finnish network Radilinja.

As the computing technology–inspired 1990s turned into the social media–driven 2000s, the sheer technological brilliance of digitization seemed all the more striking. For this next decade ushered in a range of platforms, apps and devices, along with the digital transformation of society. In 2001, iTunes and Wikipedia commenced operation. There were also new commercialized forms of social media. LinkedIn was rolled out in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube and Flickr in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. The point, seemingly, was less to apply the digital to everyday life, and instead to secure one’s social niche within the field of the digital. In 2007, smartphones arrived on the market. This was followed by the introduction of tablets in 2010. With the arrival of the 2010s, and such additional platforms as Instagram, Spotify, Google+ and Uber, culture and society was coming to mean status updates, SMS, posts, blogs, tagging, GPS and virtual reality. Digital technologies were transforming social life.

Fourth, these various interdependent systems are today everywhere transferring, coding, sorting and resorting digital information (more or less) instantaneously across global networks. With systems of digitization and technological automation, information processing becomes the pervasive architecture of our densely networked environments. As society becomes informationalized as never before, digitization emerges as the operating backcloth against which everything is coded, tagged, scanned and located. Complex automated systems of digital technology emerge as the ‘surround’ to both everyday life and modern institutions. These technological systems seem to usher in worlds – informational, digital, and virtual – that are generalized; that is, these technologies are increasingly diffused throughout contemporary systems of activity and take on the appearance of a functionality which is “wall-to-wall”. Today’s independent, informational systems of digitization are, to invoke Adam Greenfield, both “everywhere and everyware”.¹⁶ From GPS to RFID tagging, and from augmented reality to the Internet of Things, these various interdependent systems are the architectural surround or operational backcloth through which airport doors automatically open, credit card transactions are enabled, SMS is enacted, and big data is accessed. As Greenfield contends, this increasingly pervasive digital surround scoops up “all of the power of a densely networked environment, but refining its perceptible signs until they disappear into the things we do every day”.¹⁷

To invoke the possibility of disappearance in this context, as Greenfield does, is to raise the question of the hidden and the invisible as concerns systems of digitalization. Digital life inaugurates a transformation in the nature of invisibility – operationalized through supercomputers, big data, and artificial intelligence – and the changing relation between the visible, the hidden and power. My argument is that the rise of systems of digital technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has created a new form of invisibility which is linked to the characteristics of software code, computer algorithms and AI protocols and to its modes of information processing. The invisibility created by digital technologies is that of a protocological infrastructure which orders and reorders the many connectivities, calculations, authorizations, registrations, taggings, uploads, downloads and transmissions infusing everyday life. Codes, algorithms and protocols are the invisible surround which facilitates our communications with others and our sharing with others of personal data through the array of devices and apps and wearable technolog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The digital universe
• 2 The rise of robotics
• 3 Digital life and the self
• 4 Digital technologies and social interaction
• 5 Modern societies, mobility and artificial intelligence
• 6 AI and social futures
• Notes
• Index