AI’s Impact on Social Interactions
By: Mit Ide
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Human Machine Interaction

AI’s Impact on Social Interactions

When it comes to interpersonal relationships, “friction-free” may not be the goal

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger

I recently wrote about the event I attended on February 28 to celebrate the launch of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing. This new interdisciplinary College is MIT’s response to the rise of artificial intelligence, — a profoundly powerful technology that will likely reshape our economy, society and personal lives in the decades to come. But, attaining AI’s broad potential will require not only a continuing slew of technological innovations, but equally important research on the challenges our society must get ready for, including ethical issues, workplace disruptions, and human interactions.

The event included keynotes and panels on a wide variety of topics. One of the talks I found most interesting was Rethinking Friction in Digital Culture by Sherry Turkle, MIT Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology.

In her many writings and seminars, — including her 2011 best-seller Alone Together, — Professor Turkle has long been warning about the impact of technology on our social interactions. “Most of us here today were introduced to the idea of friction free as a really good thing,” she said at the start of her keynote. “It’s an aesthetic of engineering efficiency, so why shouldn’t it be a really good thing?” This idea that technical things should be friction free and smooth easily bleeds into other domains. “Efficiency becomes aspirational — in politics, in business, in education, and in our thinking about relationships.”

She cited a few examples of the kinds of friction free interactions she’s come across in her research on technology and social relationships. People of all ages have told her that they prefer to text rather than talk— even when interacting with a colleague in the next cubicle or office. People have said to her that they prefer to text their spouse rather than have a face-to-face conversation. Friction free, she explained, “is usually tied up with a hope for greater efficiency and less vulnerability.”

AI, perhaps without meaning to, has now become part of this friction free story. AI, almost by definition, is all about “the promise of efficiency without vulnerability — or, increasingly, about the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. But by trying to move ahead toward the friction free, we are getting ourselves into all kinds of new trouble.”

The problem with a friction free digital culture is that, in many cases, life teaches us one thing and technology teaches us another. “Technology encouraged us to forget what we knew about life. And we made a digital world, where we could forget what life was teaching us… It’s time to associate the digital with other values than the value of easy. Let’s say, the opposite of easy. And it’s time to remember that the opposite of easy is not just difficult. The opposite of easy is also evoked by words such as complex, involved, and demanding.”

Professor Turkle concluded her talk by reminding us that while increasingly living in a technological world, we must keep in mind “what we know about life and the life we want to live. We have to work on the real world as hard as we work on our technology. We can’t just work on our technology and hope it fixes the real world.” Her thought provoking talk can be seen in this video.

Yale professor Nicholas Christakis made similar points in a recent article in The Atlantic— How AI Will Rewire US.

Science fiction has long portrayed the biggest threats of AI to humans as computers gone beserk, like the Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey; or homicidal cyborgs, like The Terminator. Some fear that in a post-Singularity future, superintelligent general AI will far surpass human intelligence, posing an existential threat to humanity.

But, the real threat to humanity, said professor Christakis, is that “For better and for worse, robots will alter humans’ capacity for altruism, love, and friendship”

Major innovations have long had an impact on the ways that people interact with each other. Technologies like the printing press, the telephone, radio, TV, and more recently the Internet, revolutionized how we access and exchange information.

“As consequential as these innovations were, however, they did not change the fundamental aspects of human behavior that comprise what I call the social suite: a crucial set of capacities we have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, including love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching…” he wrote. “But adding artificial intelligence to our midst could be much more disruptive. Especially as machines are made to look and act like us and to insinuate themselves deeply into our lives, they may change how loving or friendly or kind we are — not just in our direct interactions with the machines in question, but in our interactions with one another.”

AI can both help improve the way we relate to one another, as well as make us behave less ethically.

Experiments with hybrid groups of people and robots working together have shown that the right kind of AI can help improve the group’s overall performance. But, in other experiments, he found that by adding a few bots posing as selfish humans, the same groups that previously behaved in an altruistic, generous way toward each other were now driven by the bots to behave in a selfish way. This shouldn’t surprise us, as over the last few years we’ve seen how the spread of misinformation by malicious bots over social media can have a highly negative, polarizing impact on large groups of people.

“Cooperation is a key feature of our species, essential for social life. And trust and generosity are crucial in differentiating successful groups from unsuccessful ones. If everyone pitches in and sacrifices in order to help the group, everyone should benefit. When this behavior breaks down, however, the very notion of a public good disappears, and everyone suffers.”

“The fact that AI might meaningfully reduce our ability to work together is extremely concerning… As AI permeates our lives, we must confront the possibility that it will stunt our emotions and inhibit deep human connections, leaving our relationships with one another less reciprocal, or shallower, or more narcissistic.”

We will need rules, laws and policy oversight to help us deal with the potentially negative impacts of AI on society— not unlike how we’ve stopped corporations from polluting our water supply or individuals from spreading harmful cigarette smoke. “Because the effects of AI on human-to-human interaction stand to be intense and far-reaching, and the advances rapid and broad, we must investigate systematically what second-order effects might emerge, and discuss how to regulate them on behalf of the common good.”

“In the not-distant future, AI-endowed machines may, by virtue of either programming or independent learning (a capacity we will have given them), come to exhibit forms of intelligence and behavior that seem strange compared with our own,” writes professor Christakis in conclusion. “We will need to quickly differentiate the behaviors that are merely bizarre from the ones that truly threaten us. The aspects of AI that should concern us most are the ones that affect the core aspects of human social life — the traits that have enabled our species’ survival over the millennia.”