How Society is Adopting Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) as I wrote a short while ago, is having its moment in our world. AI has been lurking in the background, doing certain things, sometimes with a burst of publicity, then slouching off into the background of life. This is no longer the case.
As a technology anthropologist who’s been analysing and studying how humans, cultures and societies create, adopt and use technology, this is a fascinating and exciting time.
In today’s digital world where we are hyper-connected and mass communication almost instantaneous, we go into a phase of hype around that new technology. This happened with social media. With the rise of AI tools that we can truly understand however, we’re not in a hype phase, we’re in a hysteria phase. Why and why is this different?
Throughout human history, new technologies have taken a long time to be absorbed, adopted and adapted to various cultures. Different societies took their time to figure out the way they wanted to use a new technology.
Adoption sped up over time too. This speeding up started with the printing press and the coinciding of transportation technologies as in better ships. So what is different about these new AI tools?
A few factors have come together. First, the obvious, mass communication technology at super fast speeds. More societies are connected than even when social media burst onto the scene. More smartphones too. Secondly, we saw how these new AI tools affected us not just in one part of our society, but so many parts. This is unusual for a new technology. And thirdly, these AI tools, specifically Generative AI (GAI) slammed like a bullet train into multiple sociocultural systems all at once. This is an usual mixture.
This is also causing us to ask in a louder voice, the deeper philosophical questions around AI. Questions that have been hanging around for a while, but not with as much earnestness and anxiousness as today. What’s going on?
Usually, a new technology impacts one area of a society, such as railways did, then it moves out into broader society. Initially, railways were built to enable faster transport between coal mines and cities in the UK. Then some entrepreneur realised cattle, goods and people could also be moved. And money could be made. Clever. It lead to some social unrest as all revolutionary technologies have done to varying degrees.
What we are witnessing now is the adoption of a revolutionary technology at an unprecedented scale. We are experimenting with it in many parts of society; industry, law, politics, geopolitics, religions, art, music, literature, knowledge work, medicine, science, economics.
We’re talking about it, playing with it, experimenting and figuring out how we want to use AI at an unprecedented pace. Generative AI tools are easy to use and can be accessed almost anywhere in the world at any time on multiple devices. This too, has never happened with a revolutionary technology before.
We’re also sharing how, when, where and why we are using GAI tools via social media, within workplace networks, in news media. Capital too, is moving faster into the AI sector than it did in the first .com boom of the late 90’s and early 00's.
This is why it’s more a hysteria phase than hype. That’s not a negative. What it means is that we are likely to see a much faster adoption of AI into more societies than any previous technology. There are risks. As with any technology there are unintended consequences. We already see that ChatGPT and others can generate their own false facts. That students have used it to cheat on writing papers. But we also saw how quickly some clever people have created tools to detect AI generated content. Marketers have already generated massive amounts of marketing content that is largely meaningless. This is all part of the adoption process.
The very speed at which we are adopting and figuring out how to use these new AI tools will bring dangers but it will also result in better outcomes in the long run. The interesting thing is that we’re teaching one another, using cultural tools such as behaviours, norms and traditions, how we want AI to be part of a global society. We’ve never done this before. This is as big a game changer as the invention of stone tools, but at an almost instantaneous speed at scale.
