AI is altering the very experience of being human, says the Financial Times’ AI expert Madhumita Murgia

Over the past year, we have begun to see, already, the early human impact of technologies like ChatGPT: on our work, on children’s education and on creativity. But AI is simultaneously affecting other, significant areas of our society: healthcare, policing, public welfare and military warfare, creating rippling consequences and lasting social change. It is altering the very experience of being human. That’s what this book is about.

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The power of machine-learning models is that they make statistical connections that are often invisible to humans. Their decisions and methods are not determined by the people who build them, which is why they are described as black boxes. This makes them supposedly far more objective than their human counterparts, but their reasoning is often opaque and non-intuitive – even to their creators.

For instance, researchers developing Covid-19 diagnostic algorithms used a corpus of pneumonia chest X-rays as a control group, which happened to belong to children aged one to five. This resulted in their models erroneously learning to distinguish children from adults, rather than Covid from pneumonia patients. These systems are mysterious entities with unknowable cognitive patterns.

Aside from being technically opaque, people whose lives are impacted by automated systems are rarely aware of it. The way in which algorithms have been introduced into society has caused an erosion of our individual feelings of autonomy, but also a diminishing of the power and agency of those we trust as our proxies – transfiguring our society.

If individuals are aware of an algorithm making decisions that affect them, they are usually locked out of the system’s workings, which companies claim to be intellectual property, and are stymied in any quest for justice by institutional blind faith or a lack of understanding. We’re all stuck in an endless loop of “computer says no”.

Losing our sense of autonomy and control means it is harder to take responsibility for our own actions. It becomes harder to legally assign blame or judgement to individuals or corporations, who can place responsibility on AI software. And after all, a machine can’t be put on trial.

In the 1980s, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura described agency – that feeling of control over our actions and their consequences – as intrinsic to human nature and, ultimately, to our evolution as a species. Humans, he said, were contributors to their life circumstances and society, not just a product of them.

Bandura outlined how people exercised their influence in three distinct ways: as individuals, through proxies and as a collective. Proxy agents are generally people with expertise or resources – like doctors, law enforcement officers or elected representatives – that we choose to speak for us, and collectives pool their knowledge and power to shape a better future for everyone.

Philosophers believe that ultimately a person’s freedom is threaded inextricably with the quality of their agency – their ability to perceive their actions and desires as their own, and to feel able to create change. In small and large ways, AI systems are impinging on this, creating a feeling of individual disempowerment – even a sense of loss of our free will.

This is our predicament as a society: the ways in which AI, and other statistical algorithms are governed over the coming years will profoundly impact us all. Yet we lack the tools to interrogate that change. We don’t fully comprehend their impacts. We cannot decide what morals we want to encode in these systems. We disagree on the controls we may want to impose on AI software. We are collectively relinquishing our moral authority to machines.

But while people are feeling robbed of their individual ability to direct their own actions and attention, AI systems have led, unexpectedly, to a strengthening of collective agency. Ironically, the intrinsic qualities of automated systems – their opaqueness, inflexibility, constantly changing and unregulated nature – are galvanising people to band together and fight back, to reclaim their humanity.

By reflecting on the march of AI, we can start to address the imbalances in power, and move toward redress. My hope is that the experiences of the people in this book will rouse us from our fears, to take back our agency and self-respect. After all, without these, are we even human anymore?

This is an extract from Code Dependent: How AI Is Changing Our Lives by Madhumita Murgia (Pan Macmillan). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Madhumita Murgia will be talking about the impact of artificial intelligence at this week’s “A Drink with the Idler“, Thursday 8 May, 6-7pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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