Needs-aware artificial intelligence: AI that ‘serves [human] needs’

Abstract

By defining the current limits (and thereby the frontiers), many boundaries are shaping, and will continue to shape, the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We push on these boundaries to make further progress into what were yesterday's frontiers. They are both pliable and resilient-always creating new boundaries of what AI can (or should) achieve. Among these are technical boundaries (such as processing capacity), psychological boundaries (such as human trust in AI systems), ethical boundaries (such as with AI weapons), and conceptual boundaries (such as the AI people can imagine). It is within these boundaries that we find the construct of needs and the limitations that our current concept of need places on the future AI.

Needs and artificial intelligence

“…There is an urgency to beginning this journey [7], a "burning platform" [8] of sorts: more and more AI applications are in development, AI is increasingly important in many aspects of peoples' lives, and AI development won't necessarily wait for needs scholars and practitioners to sit on the fences of the issues we outline in this article. AI development is evolving rapidly, and though there is still a great distance to go before artificial general intelligence (AGI), today's intelligent agents are already changing lives at home, work, and societies without adequate systematic, comprehensive, or practical ways to integrate the awareness of needs into their design, implementation, or evaluation.…”

“…In the development of the technologies that power AI (and those that are powered by AI), we contend AI-driven sociotechnical systems are ideally sustainable. Here, we will apply Human-centric, Accountable, Lawful, and Ethical AI (Sustainable HALE AI) 7 as a framework for sustainable AI. Noting, however, that, even within this framework, needs should find a more applied role than in current approaches to HALE AI-which is one of our motivations for writing this article.…”