One of the most persistent concerns about the future is whether it will
be dominated by the predictive algorithms of AI - and, if so, what this
will mean for our behaviour, for our institutions and for what it means
to be human. AI changes our experience of time and the future and
challenges our identities, yet we are blinded by its efficiency and fail
to understand how it affects us.
At the heart of our trust in AI lies a paradox: we leverage AI to
increase our control over the future and uncertainty, while at the same
time the performativity of AI, the power it has to make us act in the
ways it predicts, reduces our agency over the future. This happens when
we forget that that we humans have created the digital technologies to
which we attribute agency. These developments also challenge the
narrative of progress, which played such a central role in modernity and
is based on the hubris of total control. We are now moving into an era
where this control is limited as AI monitors our actions, posing the
threat of surveillance, but also offering the opportunity to
reappropriate control and transform it into care.
As we try to adjust to a world in which algorithms, robots and avatars
play an ever-increasing role, we need to understand better the
limitations of AI and how their predictions affect our agency, while at
the same time having the courage to embrace the uncertainty of the
future.
