Cultural Agency & Digital Technologies
The role of cultural agency in how society adopts technologies and now A.I. is critical but often misunderstood with regard to its power.
While there’s certainly a lot of AI doomerism as well as overhype around Artificial Intelligence, I think there’s something far more exciting and interesting afoot with regard to AI. And other digital technologies. We’re really have some very profound, deep thinking around Artificial Intelligence and what it means for society and to be human in an age of being unprecedentedly connected. This is wonderful.
What’s struck me of recent as I consider my work into how humans adopt, use and adapt technology socioculturally, is that we seem to be making some overly declarative statements about AI without much evidence.
Alright, so what does that all mean in less academic sounding terms (I am not an academic.)
In order for AI to find it’s place as a technology within human societies, it will have to be given cultural agency. The amount of cultural agency AI is afforded will be what determines how we end up using it. If it ultimately succeeds or fails.
While we are having these debates and discussions around the potential benefits and dangers of AI to humanity, they are most often framed entirely in economic terms. Our current form of capitalism. This is of course, quite understandable.
But we are increasingly having deeper, philosophical discussions, such as that posed by philosopher Dr. Carissa Véliz and her book “Privacy is Power”. The social sciences are weighing in to these discussions much more.
We often assume today that any and all technological successes are purely driven by capitalism and can only be measured in it’s economic terms. In part, yes. But not entirely. And such a view is overly deterministic. Markets do not, in fact, determine everything. Far from it.
What I propose here however, is that this economic, deterministic viewpoint misses the force that actually ends up determining the role, success and application within societies of all technologies; culture. In this case, cultural agency as I define it.
Culture is comprised of several elements such as aesthetics (literature, arts, architecture, music), political and economic systems, social norms, behaviours, traditions, militaries and social governance. These elements combine to create culture and are used in various ways to determine how a technology is ultimately shaped by humans after it first shapes us.
Cultural agency, as I see it from the perspective of the adoption of technologies in society, is the agency that society as a whole gives to a technology for how it will act within current sociocultural systems, and the ways that technology will ultimately be used by various sociocultural systems.
We see the cultural agency in action through the ways academia, non-profits, citizen activists, political powers and economic forces react to a given technology. It is a generally a slow process that evolves over time as the impacts of the technology become understood, whether good or bad.
The degree, shape and form of cultural agency will vary by society. Cultures that are more individualistic in nature (such as America, a very “me first” society) and ones that are more “we” first (like many Asian and Nordic cultures) see technologies very differently and end up governing them very differently.
Cultural agency is inherently dynamic. It is influenced by power relations, social structures, political systems, economic models, historical context, identity, religion and social norms. While capitalism does play a role, it is not what determines global acceptance of a technology alone.
At the forefront of AIs (more specifically Generative AI and less so other forms of AI) push into society is industry, with the sole objective of monetization and being driven by entrepreneurs in the current form of capitalism. That means delivering shareholder value ahead of customer value. Leaders of these AI businesses largely hold true to the ideology of effective accelerationism (e/acc) which is well defined by Marshall Stanton here.
While industry leaders in the world of AI do carry significant social influence, no single leader, nor all of them together if they were united, have enough power dynamic to influence the entirety of global societies and cultures and the adoption of AI within them.
In large part, much of society, even in the “me first” culture of the United States, is pushing back against these leaders. While AI leaders may tout that business is or has already undergone fundamental change, there is little to no evidence to validate such claims. Such evidence can only be found over periods of time longer than two years.
Technologies, even mass scale revolutionary ones, take longer to affect true societal change than their hype would suggest. The more significant the change is perceived to be by a society, the harder the pushback against the technology will be.
This removes a degree of cultural agency from the technology, thus it is not regulations that slow a technology’s adoption down, it is culture. The e/acc movement may focus on regulation and government bureaucracy as hampering AIs progress, but this is them misunderstanding the role of culture.
The culture of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tends to think only in terms of problem solving, not systems complexity and largely shuns the social sciences in favour of hard science. This is a significant reason for why the social media giants have largely failed society. They are are now starting to be held accountable. The AI entrepreneurs would be wise to take note.
While governments have hauled the CEOs of AI and social media companies before them to testify on their misdeeds and actions, the techno-optimists railings against bureaucracy are misplaced. It is actually the result of the invisible hand and cultural agency at work. Politicians in democracies (sometimes in fragile autocracies like Russia and China) will eventually respond to societal pressures. This is now happening with not just AI, but social media on ethical use and companies like Amazon on anti-trust issues.
That parliaments and congresses in the WEIRD countries are questioning these leaders should be seen as a sign of a healthy democracy. It is the will of the people at work.
This is one way in which cultural agency is used to determine how technologies are eventually accepted into society.
We may be inundated with hype around AI, for both dangers and benefits. Some will spend hours speculating on the roles and actions of AI business leaders like Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others, but they are bit players in the greater scheme of things. They may have influence, but they are not the deciders.
But as I laid out at the beginning of this article, it is wonderful that we are having these conversations, debates. This is humanity at work using the incredible power of culture. Which is how we ultimately solve problems through critical thinking. It is also, in part, why I we are more likely to end up with AI that benefits humanity as well as genetic engineering, robots and other related technologies.