Reciprocity Deficits: Observing AI in the street with everyday publics

TL;DR

This paper investigates how AI systems in urban streets are often invisible and misunderstood by the public, exploring the social implications and proposing participatory design interventions to enhance engagement and trust.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of 'reciprocity deficits' to describe the social invisibility of AI in streets and develops 'everyday AI observatories' as participatory tools for public engagement.

Findings

Identified tensions between AI deployment and public perception in streets

Highlighted the invisibility of AI and its impact on public trust

Proposed design interventions to foster material participation

Abstract

The street has emerged as a primary site where everyday publics are confronted with AI as an infrastructural phenomenon, as machine learning-based systems are now commonly deployed in this setting in the form of automated cars, facial recognition, smart billboards and the like. While these deployments of AI in the street have attracted significant media attention and public controversy in recent years, the presence of AI in the street often remains inscrutable, and many everyday publics are unaware of it. In this paper, we explore the challenges and possibilities of everyday public engagement with AI in the situated environment of city streets under these paradoxical conditions. Combining perspectives and approaches from social and cultural studies of AI, Design Research and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we explore the affordances of the street as a site for 'material participation' in AI through design-based interventions: the creation of 'everyday AI observatories.' We narrate and reflect on our participatory observations of AI in five city streets in the UK and Australia and highlight a set of tensions that emerged from them: 1) the framing of the street as a transactional environment, 2) the designed invisibility of AI and its publics in the street 3) the stratification of street environments through statistical governance. Based on this discussion and drawing on Jane Jacobs' notion of "eyes on the street," we put forward the relational notion of "reciprocity deficits" between AI infrastructures and everyday publics in the street. The conclusion reflects on the consequences of this form of social invisibility of AI for situated engagement with AI by everyday publics in the street and for public trust in urban governance.