I spoke yesterday at the Content Design Club meetup about accessibility and humane design.
There is one part of the talk I want to highlight in this post. It is about borrowing and lending.
Technologies borrow human capacities to create capabilities that they then present back to human users.
Reciprocation as society
Borrowing and lending capacity is fundamental to people. It is part of the reciprocity of gift-giving and receiving that makes up much of the social alignment and cooperation within human society.
It is also how much of the human culture works: thru an intermixing of imagination and emotions by artists and audiences.
Video games have depended on borrowing human capacity for many years. The pixelated blocks that are people/cars/spaceships in early games used human imagination to invest them with meaning.
Technologies borrowing human capacity is an extension of that reciprocity coupled with the human habit of anthropomorphising non-humans (like animals). We extend our sense of what is human to creatures and even inanimate objects. Again, the few pixels that were early Mario became emotionally real because of what was lent rather than what was there.
Humans have strained for years to offer game visuals and robots some semblance of emotional capacity and kindness. This strain is apparent with AI now.
Robot relationships
Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation (10 years old this year) has examples of that in research done with robots and kids. When a robot failed technically and the experiment was cancelled, the child asked why the robot hated them. They had lent their sense of a relationship to the robot. They then felt bad because it was not reciprocated. The robot did not feel the child was a friend.
This projection and rejection is visible now in the multiple stories of people have intense and sometimes painful relationships with AI systems like ChatGPT. They lend romantic hopes, emotional pain and sociability to the AI in long conversations and what is given back is sometimes enough and sometimes terribly too much.
Rebalancing reciprocity
What seems important is to both recognise the borrowing/lending nature of the relationship between technologies and humans and to equalise it.
Too much is made of the brilliance of AI at this moment. The superiority of technology over humans. The replacement of people by automated systems that will perform better than humans.
This imbalance does not help anyone, technology or human.
Companies need to be honest about what they borrow (above and beyond what they have done copying IP like books and images). They need to be explicit that the AI are made by people. The prompts are where humans lend AI context, ethics and emotions.
It is unhealthy for all of us when we dismiss the capacities of humans and only praise the capabilities of technologies.
Rebalancing reciprocity is a start.