What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean?
This work addresses a foundational problem for AI researchers and ethicists by clarifying the meaning of human-centered AI, though it is incremental in its conceptual analysis rather than offering new empirical results.
The paper tackles the conceptual ambiguity of 'human-centred AI' by arguing that AI inherently involves a relationship between technology and human cognition, using examples like abacuses and cameras to illustrate displacement, enhancement, or replacement of cognitive labor. It concludes that obfuscating this cognitive aspect distorts critical engagement and limits human-centered engineering in AI.
While it seems sensible that human-centred artificial intelligence (AI) means centring "human behaviour and experience," it cannot be any other way. AI, I argue, is usefully seen as a relationship between technology and humans where it appears that artifacts can perform, to a greater or lesser extent, human cognitive labour. This is evinced using examples that juxtapose technology with cognition, inter alia: abacus versus mental arithmetic; alarm clock versus knocker-upper; camera versus vision; and sweatshop versus tailor. Using novel definitions and analyses, sociotechnical relationships can be analysed into varying types of: displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. Ultimately, all AI implicates human cognition; no matter what. Obfuscation of cognition in the AI context -- from clocks to artificial neural networks -- results in distortion, in slowing critical engagement, perverting cognitive science, and indeed in limiting our ability to truly centre humans and humanity in the engineering of AI systems. To even begin to de-fetishise AI, we must look the human-in-the-loop in the eyes.