A multidisciplinary book explores the ethical and human-centered implications of AI and autonomous systems, offering insights across diverse sectors and societal challenges.
Book: Humane Autonomous Technology - Re-thinking Experience with and in Intelligent Systems. Image Credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock
In an era when artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems are rapidly transforming various sectors, a book by a multidisciplinary group of scholars offers a timely and critical examination of these technologies from a human-centered perspective. The open-access book delves into the ethical, humane, and holistic aspects of AI and autonomous systems, emphasizing their impact on human lives and ways of working. It also explores AI's broader social and political challenges, including data privacy, surveillance, and socio-economic divides.
It is vital to understand how humans experience and act in, around, and with the technology when developing these systems and developing businesses around them. Whether you are a software developer or a business developer, this book affords insight that spans across the boundaries of areas in human life, says Rebekah Rousi, Associate Professor in Communication Studies at the University of Vaasa, Finland.
Rousi is one of the editors of Humane Autonomous Technology together with Catharina von Koskull, Associate Professor of Marketing from the University of Vaasa, and Virpi Roto, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Practice of Design from Aalto University.
Ethical and humane considerations
One of the book's central themes is the ethical implications of AI and autonomous systems. The editors and contributors explore challenging questions related to intellectual property rights, human roles, biases, and the potential for these technologies to adopt deviant human traits. The book emphasizes the need for ethical design and implementation practices that prioritize human well-being and creativity. It also calls for policies and governance frameworks to ensure AI deployment aligns with societal values and fairness.
The significant challenges concerning AI very much relate to ethics, moral conduct, as well as sustainability. In addition to the previously foreseen "Robots will steal our jobs" types of concerns, we have a myriad of new challenges arising. For example, the book discusses how AI impacts corporate responsibility, highlighting how major tech companies have struggled to meet carbon neutrality commitments. Several big tech companies have pulled out of their carbon neutrality promises. Also, ethics, ethical content delivery, and consumption have proven challenging with the rise of a new form of sweatshops – data cleaning centers – located in the Global South to filter inappropriate content from large language models. Rousi says there is genuinely a lot to address both as researchers and developers.
Impact on various sectors
Humane Autonomous Technology offers a truly multidisciplinary approach to autonomous technology. The contributors represent disciplines including human-computer interaction, interaction design, art, service, art consumer studies, and cognitive science. By exploring AI as part of a more extensive system of systems, the book provides an integrated understanding of how these disciplines intersect. Many of these contributors already cross disciplinary boundaries in their research.
The book is divided into four themes: Labour, co-work, and industry; Cognition and emotion; Humanness and values; and Art, design, art, and visual culture. For instance, the chapters on labor and industry go beyond chatbot collaboration, addressing power dynamics and the evolving role of worker agency in AI-driven environments. The contributors in the arts and design section examine how AI can be integrated responsibly to enhance worker-centered practices.
According to Rousi, one key lesson from the book is that the role of artificial intelligence in the workplace and its services needs to be explicitly defined.
Do we want the technology to remain as a tool? Should it be our slave or even co-worker? For what reasons do we attribute these specific roles to the technology? Once more, reflecting on the information-rich nature of the technology, AI is rapidly changing our relationship with tools, work, and life in general. Rousi says it also forces us to re-think our own roles and identity.
The book argues that autonomous technologies should be viewed as part of a more extensive system of systems, with each component working together to enhance human experiences. This systemic approach aims to foster a more nuanced understanding of AI's impact and develop actionable strategies for responsible implementation. By taking this approach, the book aims to foster a more nuanced and ethical perspective on the development and deployment of AI.
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