The Social Context for Generative AI

I’ve already started writing for a second book on Generative AI (more on this soon) and the section i’ve been working on today considers the ‘context’ in which it has emerged. Specifically i am looking beyond the ‘technical’ – so not the sequence of technological breakthroughs, and economic considerations that have enabled a global rollout of a new technology in record speed, but rather the social contexts in which this has occurred. Today i’m sharing just a few fragmentary thoughts around that.

Considering the social context of Generative AI we may consider some of the following:

1. That we now accept that knowledge is distributed, no longer centralised. This itself is a huge leap, as we spent much of human history codifying, owning, and controlling access to knowledge. When we break the links between knowledge and power (e.g libraries, books, universities etc) we open the doors to ‘knowledge’ being generated.

2. That knowledge is increasingly dynamic: not one truth forever, but the ‘generation’ of truths according to dynamic inputs and context – again, a huge leap, but one that has been enabled by mobile technology – as knowledge started to travel with us, it also ceased to be monolithic. We could equally call this a democratisation of knowledge as the relationship between ‘space’ and ‘power’ as severed and digitally re-contextualised.

3. That dialogue with technology is legitimate: generations of ‘smart’ technology have taught us not just that we ‘can’ talk to technology, but that to do so is legitimate – indeed, potentially ‘human’. This may be a foundation for the acceptance of technology as ‘conscious’, as ‘intelligent’, as ‘ethical’.

4. Organisations have started to abandon ‘infrastructure’ as a defining characteristic, in favour of people – and specifically the discretionary investment of engagement from the people they already employ. In this sense, the dialogic nature of Generative AI is a natural progression of the social collaboration that Organisations are seeking to foster. So now you get me, my dog on our Teams calls, and my digital twin in your meetings.

5. That the marvellous is everyday: we have made the magical no longer mystical. Many things we could only distantly conceive have turned out to be visualisable, achievable or at least some shadow of such. We are used to amazing things. So one more amazing thing is accepted with increased rapidity. Whilst people believe that there may be copyright or bias issues with Generative AI, few people think it’s stealing their soul.

6. The context of the Social Age illustrates that we are radically connected, and hence the proliferation of technology can also be a primarily social as opposed to feature led phenomenon.

7. On top of all this, i would argue that the primary reason that Generative AI has exploded is that there is almost no barrier to understanding what it does (at a vernacular level – it answers questions, draws pictures etc) or use (just speak or type…). It’s storytelling technology, and we all know how stories work, and it’s dialogic, and for most of us this is our primary way of communicating. So a technology that can ‘talk’ and ‘tell stories’ is naturally integrated into our worldview, with almost no barrier to adoption or productivity.

Or to put it another way: the context of Generative AI is social and shared, and hence rapid and (substantially) unopposed, or only asynchronously and retrospectively opposed.

Early stage writing shared as part of #WorkingOutLoud