Do Children Dream of Connected Watches?

How the connected citizens experience the world

Abstract

As our society relies increasingly on artificial intelligence in day-to-day life, we have very limited knowledge and control of its uses and consequences on our representations, values, behaviors, lifestyles, etc. However, it deeply affects and shapes our relationship to the world: how we interact with others and our environment (e.g. smart devices that we wear or have installed in our home), how we perceive space and time, what control we have on our sleep, health, etc. Since AI designs and uses are developed by companies mainly economically motivated, the examination of the conceptual, anthropological, and moral impacts of the emergent experiences to which our interactions with AI contribute to generally overlooked. There is an urgent need to study these issues in order re-invest in the citizens the possibility to decide in which society they want to live, what values should be promoted, what relationships to the others and the environment should be favored. In this paper, I study the power relations between humans and connected objects.