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Agency in augmented reality: exploring the ethics of Facebook’s AI-powered predictive recommendation system

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Abstract

The development of predictive algorithms for personalized recommendations that prioritize ads, filter content, and tailor our decision-making processes will increasingly impact our society in the upcoming years. One example of what this future might hold was recently presented by Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) who work on augmented reality (AR) glasses powered by contextually aware AI that allows the user to “communicate, navigate, learn, share, and take action in the world” (Facebook Reality Labs 2021). A major feature of those glasses is “the intelligent click” that presents action prompts to the user based on their personal history and previous choices. The user can accept or decline those suggested action prompts depending on individual preferences. Facebook/Meta presents this technology as a gateway to “increased agency”. However, Facebook’s claim presumes a simplistic view of agency according to which our agentive capacities increase parallel to the ease in which our actions are carried out. Technologies that structure people’s lives need to be based on a deeper understanding of agency that serves as the conceptual basis in which predictive algorithms are developed. With the goal of mapping this emerging terrain, the aim of this paper is to offer a thorough analysis of the agency-limiting risks and the agency-enhancing potentials of Facebook’s “intelligent click” feature. Based on a concept of agency by Dignum (Responsible Artificial Intelligence: How to Develop and Use AI in a Responsible Way. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2019), the three agential dimensions of autonomy (acting independently), adaptability (reacting to changes in the environment), and interactivity (interacting with other agents) are analyzed towards our ability to make self-determining choices.

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Notes

  1. In a recent interview with the verge [24], Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed more information about the companies’ long term goals by explaining his vision of generating what he calls a “metaverse”, i.e. a space in which the physical and the virtual world come together to build their own economy. Zuckerberg describes this as an “embodied internet where instead of just viewing content—you are in it.” This vision became more concrete with the recent announcement of the company’s name change from Facebook to Meta at their annual meeting “Connect 2021” [22].

  2. While many businesses struggled in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Netflix increased their subscribers to 203.67 million [20].

  3. There are many other ethical issues discussed in the literature such as algorithm privacy [9], bias [16], and trust [33]. While those issues are connected to agency in numerous direct and indirect ways, this paper will concentrate on the influence of AI on the agentive capacities of their users.

  4. It should be noted that the literature offers a variety of definitions, criteria, and viewpoints for human agency. In the philosophical subfield of action theory, agency is tied to intentionality of a person performing an action [4], [25]. While the three dimensions introduced in this paper are not sufficient to capture the whole phenomenon of agency, they are exceptionally well suited to point at those agentive capacities that might be taken over by an artificial system. This makes them an ideal candidate to analyze the agentive relationship between human agents and AI powered devices.

  5. The only exceptions are action prompts that are intentionally set by the user as a reminder to start the respective activity or offering more autonomy-preserving choices. In the former case, the user would be the decision-maker by setting up appropriate alarms, or allowing the algorithm to be notified if certain criteria are met. In the latter case, in addition to a simple affirmation through clicking “yes”, action prompts could also be accompanied by other agency preserving prompts such as “no” or, if the system is constantly nagging, a “leave me alone” button).

  6. I want to thank my anonymous reviewer for suggesting this example.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (EEC-1028725).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Andreas Schönau

  2. Center for Neurotechnology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Andreas Schönau

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Schönau, A. Agency in augmented reality: exploring the ethics of Facebook’s AI-powered predictive recommendation system. AI Ethics 3, 407–417 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00158-4

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