Being Human in the Age of AI, Part 3: AI as Medium

Part 3 in a series of updates on the book I am writing with Richard Russell.

This week, I reflect back on my digital journey, tracing back to the days when online book purchases and Yahoo groups were my gateway to the digital world. But it's not just about nostalgia. The evolution of technology, especially AI, is redefining how we communicate, record our lives, and even understand our needs.

Think about it: our most personal experiences - the way we think, feel, even fall in love - are becoming part of the online world, what I call "cosiety". We exchange bits of our brains, whether it's a like, a photo, or a quick thought, feeding into these massive AI systems. Sometimes it's transactional, but often it's more about shaping how the world sees us. The lines are totally blurred between our inner and outer selves, and honestly, we need new ways of thinking about the economics AND the psychology of all this.

The exchange of thoughts and feelings -- whether monetized or not -- is happening on a whole new level now. We aren't even dealing with whole people anymore, but with tiny fragments of our attention or emotions. You spend a split second deciding if a photo deserves a heart emoji, while someone else is rating a piece of music. Forget multitasking, this is a micro-economy where our brains are the product. We need insights from cognitive science, economics, and philosophy to grasp this brave new world!

I am thinking back to the first thing I did on the internet besides browsing. Knowing myself, it was probably buying books, but Yahoo groups were a big thing in my life for a while. I came to the internet in my twenties, relatively late compared to anyone born in the 21st century, but my encounter with the web coincided with my moving to another country, so you could say I was a digital native in my new avatar. As a digital native, the web is often how I connect with the physical world. Secondhand bookstores across the country - and sometimes across the world - are my favorite web-enabled meat space discovery. 

I am admittedly both a nerd and a geek, and the early web was made for people like me. Still, the universality of computing is such that sooner or later, it targets all our needs, especially when the social conditions are ripe for transformation. Humans seek mates, so it's no surprise that dating websites and apps have been around since the beginning of the internet. That's biology. The liberalization of sexual mores is a social phenomenon that started in the 60s. Both are necessary conditions for matching with strangers on the internet. Internet dating builds upon the past and introduces new rituals and mores. Tinder and swiping are a new phase in the annals of romance. How young people present themselves to romantic others - even those who live close to them - is now conditioned by how they interact with one another on dating apps.

Our needs make technology possible, but in turn, the technology changes how we experience those very needs. What happens when there's a technology that changes everything at once? Writing is a good example. You can write a sonnet to your lover or a bill to your customer. Every interaction is a written interaction, at least in principle. Writing allows the transmission of experiences; for example, a good novel might give you deep insight into what it's like to be a Russian man during Napoleon's invasion. But it's impossible to write down every conversation and every minor aside. That situation has changed with computing, making it possible to record every thought and feeling as we think and feel them. AI might soon automate that so you don’t have to do anything while your life is recorded for posterity. Creepy, yes, but is it desirable? And AI doesn’t stop with recording; analyzing and modifying those thoughts and feelings is possible before putting them back into circulation. The availability of such cognitive infrastructure at scale will change how we speak and (eventually, if not right away) change what's worth speaking.

What thoughts and feelings will become permissible as a result of AI? What will become redundant or unacceptable? The French philosopher Michel Foucault theorized the 'Episteme,' which represents the tacit, underlying "rules" that determine what types of knowledge, statements, and theories are considered valid within a specific historical period. An episteme is a framework that shapes what we can think or even conceive. Foucault's analysis focuses on how these frameworks of knowledge shift throughout history. For example:

• The Renaissance: A shift from knowledge based on religious authority to knowledge based on observation and reason.

• The development of germ theory: A radical change in how we understand disease and health, shifting away from concepts like "bad air" or humors.

The episteme isn't about individual beliefs, what I personally believe to be true (perhaps I think the Moon Landing is a hoax), but the broader structures of how we form beliefs. The Episteme is tacit rather than explicit – we usually don't realize the limitations our episteme places on our thinking, and according to Foucault, epistemes change over time; what is considered valid knowledge in one era might be discounted entirely in another. Flat Earthers are crackpots (according to us) because we doubt their sources of reasoning and evidence. Consider an expansion of the Episteme that represents what we believe and how we act. Scientific laboratories and research groups are the preferred social form for creating new knowledge today, but if you want to change the world, a startup is a better bet than a research lab. Startups share the same episteme as their scientific counterparts, but their bias towards action is quite unlike their university counterparts. Startups, labs, and other institutions are the Episteme ++ of our times.

I suppose there's a term for the superset of things that constrain how we believe and act and feel: culture. But I am dissatisfied with that term: I want to be able to point out the digital gestures that everyone understands, like the smile emoji. I want to point out how computing is transforming our lives. After all, our culture is made up of acts of swiping right and responding with heart emojis and LOLs. I have a term for this computational culture of our times: Cosiety. Cosiety (Cognition/Computation + Society) is the social reality in which the mental and the social have merged into one because:

1. The elements of human mental life - thoughts, sensations, emotions - are now essential to the systems of exchange that make modern society.

2. Along with these new units of exchange come new forms of social organization, such as WhatsApp groups, etc. Even highly temporary forms of organization have become viable as long as platforms mediate them.

It's not as if our mental states haven't been evoked before. Advertising has been a thing ever since humans have sold products. But what's new is the precision with which technology companies and governments target mental states. In the cognitive culture of cosiety, individual mental states are available for sharing and exchange, like a vast extended mind that flows in and out of brains. A single thought or an image can be shared without friction: sometimes, that thought is bought or sold, but often, it's just given to the world. Our system of exchange also includes ever smaller units of time and labor, what we call the gig economy. The miniaturization of the human unit involved in the exchange is central to the move towards AI, because the vast amounts of information generated through these exchanges demand intensive data gathering and automated analysis. Computation is required at every stage of the exchange process:

1. Enabling ever smaller units of exchange

2. Enabling the discovery of exchangeable units

3. Enabling transactions of exchangeable units

In this picture, AI isn’t a thing, a person replacement, but a medium of exchange. Because it's a subtle technology, AI helps us exchange units of human life - hard to call them labor - that economies haven't been able to do until now. I can reliably give you one second of my time ( like answering a captcha or liking a photo) or share one fleeting thought. What's unique about our current moment is that these exchanges are happening at a sub-personal level. If I ask you to glance at a photo and offer a like or a love, I am initiating a transaction with your visual system, not your auditory system. You could simultaneously be listening to a piece of music and evaluating that for someone else! 

Don’t tell me we suck at 'multi-tasking' - these rapid evaluations shouldn't be judged against the standards of professional competence. It's a micro-economy of its own.

These cognitive transactions are part of our systems of exchange, but they aren't always in the money economy, and even when they are, the monetary value is far from the only value captured in the exchange. When you share a travel photo on Instagram, you might help Meta make a buck or two out of that picture, but it also helps you sell your life to the world. To call personal branding free labor on behalf of Meta is both true and missing the point: you are a willing participant in turning your life into packaged moments. An Uber ride is very much a financial transaction, but coordinating a trip to the movies with a group of friends is not a financial transaction. The disaggregation and repackaging of everyday life suffuses our lives, and its totalizing effect is greater than what the market can capture. Cosiety isn’t only about money, just as newspapers aren’t just about ad sales. Because these exchanges are at the sub-personal level, we need tools combining cognitive and economic insight to understand what's happening. 

Standard economics assumes a human being with person-level preferences and then looks at aggregating those preferences across populations. But what happens when the person is not a unified entity and each sense organ has its own preference list?

In modern societies, human life is divided into a social life dominated by economics and a personal life, which is the domain of psychology. Commentators have pointed out that economic institutions such as firms, markets and bureaucracies are already AI, i.e., vast information aggregation systems for decision-making. These institutions went hand in hand with new ways of being human. The infamous 'economic man' who makes economic decisions based on rational self-interest is the best known of these human forms. As Hirschman points out, the self-interested human wasn't seen as bad when he first came on the scene: it was better to trade bread for money than bullets for revenge. When partisans of economic globalization argue that trade will lower the chance of wars, they echo the original proponents of free trade. Commerce enabled an enormous pacification of society even as it made possible inequalities no one had seen before. Curiously, interests are both psychological and social. To the extent my interests are in making a lot of money while your interests are in having a stable family life, our interests are relative to our respective personalities. On the other hand, the economy can aggregate money maximizers in one bucket and family stabilizers in another bucket and offer work opportunities suited to both temperaments. That's social isn't it?

Cosiety vastly expands the realm with one foot in the objective and one foot in the subjective. Entities that were seen as purely subjective, such as emotions, can be tagged, aggregated and traded so that the internal is as much part of the system of exchange as the external. We need new metaphors, concepts and models to grasp a reality that's richly subjective and objective at once. Ideas from the cognitive sciences can illuminate these developments.

In next week's essay, I will talk about a concept that has already changed the digital world by influencing user experience design: Affordances.