IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021 - 6

Editorial
Editorial
AI vs " AI " : Synthetic Minds or
Speech Acts
Peter R. Lewis and Stephen Marsh
Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, ON L1G 0C5,
Canada
 The observaTion ThaT the COVID-19 pandemic
has disrupted workplace relationships and
working practices is trite; it is nonetheless true.
One significant change has been that the massive
increase in call-center employment in the past 20 years
has been mirrored during the pandemic by a corresponding
increase in remote working or working-from-home.
However, the call-center sector is,
at least anecdotally, characterized by pressurized,
target-driven completion of routine tasks often performed
by temporary, over-qualified personnel with
little personal control, investment, and engagement.
Consequently, manager-employee relationships are
often strained and, in particular, mistrustful.
Taking their cue, perhaps, from current U.K.
government ministers who asserted,
with
scant
evidence, that British workers " are among the
worst idlers in the world, " 1 one of the world's biggest
call center providers has proposed to address
this unstable and asymmetric relationship by monitoring
staff
performance through webcams on
home computers. The cameras would then feed into
an " artificial intelligence system " that would scan,
supposedly at random, to determine if an employee
was violating working rules during a shift [1].
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_Unchained. We choose not to dignify this
with a proper reference.
Jeremy Pitt
Imperial College London, London SW7 2BT, U.K.
About such surveillance; well, put it this way, the
idea does not appeal. However, it is the use of the
phrase " artificial intelligence " that particularly concerns
us here. To be frank, the way it is presented
to the workers is an abuse of both language and
a concept, in the pursuit of abusing an asymmetric
(workplace) power relationship, relationships
which persist in the AI sector too [2].
By abuse of language and abuse of concept, we
need to distinguish between artificial intelligence
(AI) as a technology with practical application, and
" artificial intelligence " ( " AI " ) as a speech act with
conventional force.
As a technology, AI exists somewhere on a spectrum
from, practically, at one end, expert systems,
path planners, and practical reasoning systems (i.e.,
algorithms that can " do " relatively simple things that
some naturally intelligent entities might be expected
to " do " ) through to, theoretically, at the other end,
Alan Turing's " imaginable digital computers which
would do well in the imitation game " [3] or John
Haugeland's synthetic intelligence [4] (i.e., machine
intelligence that is constructed but not necessarily
imitative (compare an octopus's distributed brain);
hereafter, we will refer to such intelligence as synthetic
minds).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2021.3077052
Date of current version: 3 June 2021.
6
0278-0097/21©2021 IEEE
Alternatively, " AI " as a speech act is a social constructor
that stems largely from science fiction with
computers and robots having hugely overblown
capabilities and a tendency to the apocalyptic. The
problem in the call center scenario is that a relatively
simple technology at the lower end of the AI spectrum
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2021

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