Artificial intelligent systems and reduction of human agency

Gavrilina, Elena Alexandrovna
PhD in Philosophy, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Scientific and Information Research on Science, Education and Technology, INION RAS, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Culture Studies, Bauman University, Moscow, Russia
my@egavrilina.ru


Abstract
The cardinal difference between the modern world and the one that surrounded a person only a few decades ago lies in the pervasive, comprehensive impact of technology on social behavior – from everyday worldview to political decisions, from interpersonal to international relations. Technogenic civilization, in which almost all aspects of individual and collective existence are mediated by technical devices, requires us to be projective, predictive thinking. Social communication, upbringing and education, economic development, mobility and public health – all these areas of social life depend on the decisions taken in the production of innovations. Thus, we can say that in the modern world, technology and the reality created with its help determines not only the parameters and contours of our material world, but also sets the regulations for a person as an element of functioning global sociotechnical systems. Researchers have been talking about hybrid reality for quite a long time, including the physical natural world, a person and a virtual digital environment, as part of a global sociotechnical system. This system activates the processes of reduction of human agency caused by the active inclusion of intelligent artificial systems in everyday life. This, in turn, can lead to the formation of new types of relationships between people and non-people, to new forms of social reality and new types of social practices, which, of course, requires study and forecasting.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, agency, social action