Leveraging Digital Intelligence for Community Well-Being

Abstract

The world of information is mediated by digital technologies, and the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on society, through its involvement in everyday life, is likely to present issues with lasting consequences. In the context of improving community well-being using AI, the knowledge, insights, and impressions or analysis required for activating such improvement necessitate a frame of reference. This frame needs to take into account how well-being is understood within the current paradigm of technological innovation as a driver of economic growth. The evaluation of well-being, often defined as an individual’s cognitive and affective assessment of life, takes into account emotional reaction to events based on how satisfaction and fulfillment are discerned. It is a dynamic concept that involves subjective, social, and psychological dimensions, along with a state of being where human needs are met and one can act meaningfully, thus highlighting a relational element underlying social and community well-being. Transitions from a predominantly industrial society towards one that is information-led demand a strategic social design for AI. This article evaluates how well-being is understood within the current paradigm to offer a framework for leveraging AI for community well-being.

Digital Modernity

“…Smart cities are defined as "places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems" (Townsend, 2014, 15), also Albino et al (2015), Appio et al (2019), Batty et al (2012), Caragliu et al (2011), Cocchia (2014), Joss et al (2019), Mac Síthigh (2021, O'Hara and Hall (2021, 221-228), Schaffers et al (2011), Shapiro (2006) and Zhuhadar et al (2017). The requirement on the technology is that it delivers community well-being, not simply economic growth, tax revenues or profits for the companies (Narayan, 2020). Just as the modern city, while it often shares a site with a traditional city, "is ordered upon quite different principles" (Giddens, 1990, 6), the aimcertainly not achieved at the time of writing -is that smart urbanism will be similarly transformative.…”