A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI

TL;DR

This paper argues for integrating social, cultural, and economic perspectives into AI development, emphasizing that human intelligence is fundamentally social and that technology's societal impacts require careful consideration.

Contribution

It introduces a collectivist, economic framework for AI, highlighting the importance of social and cultural factors in algorithm design and societal impact assessment.

Findings

Human intelligence is largely social and cultural in origin.

Current AI development overlooks social and societal dimensions.

A comprehensive approach blending economic, social, and computational concepts is needed.

Abstract

Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word ``intelligence'' is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline. This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin. Moreover, failing to properly situate aspects of intelligence at the social level contributes to the treatment of the societal consequences of technology as an afterthought. The path forward is not merely more data and compute, and not merely more attention paid to cognitive or symbolic representations, but a thorough blending of economic and social concepts with computational and inferential concepts at the level of algorithm design.