A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI
It critiques foundational assumptions in AI, aiming to shift the field towards more socially-aware and economically-integrated methods, which could impact all of ML/AI if adopted.
The paper argues that current AI development overly focuses on individual cognition and neglects social and cultural aspects of intelligence, proposing a new approach that integrates economic and social concepts into algorithm design to address societal consequences.
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.