Social Architecture of AI

Ai is a social technology as much as a silicon one. But ‘things’ do not simply fit within systems: they change them.

Where I live in the UK, people used to build houses of wood and stone. Local materials: nobody would transport a tree across the country to build a house. But through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries things began to change, and the Industrial Revolution supercharged it: people started to build with bricks, and bricks could be manufactured and transported on canals and trains with relative ease. So we started to see the distribution of materials away from the ‘local’. Whilst this had always been a feature for status (like the stone for cathedrals being imported at great expense), it was now a generalised feature. Bricks changed the social architecture as much as the physical.

And AI is changing the social architecture as much as trust, identity, or belonging.

Social Leadership is an ecosystem role: to tend to the system, to carry and connect, and hence when the ecosystem is disrupted, it may be a cultivating or healing one.

Whilst we may not be making decisions about procurement, strategy, or deployment, we are responsible - each in our own local way - for the social health and dynamic - to reach into the silence, to sketch maps, to share stories.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider your role in evolving the social architecture in the light or shadows of AI.