Intelligence as Agency

In his 2009 AAAI article [10], Jonathan Grudin described AI and HCI as “two fields divided by a common focus”, noting how they “competed for intellectual and economic resources” (Fig. 1(a)). HCI is in its strongest position yet — with several senior HCI researchers leading human-centered AI teams, organizations, and institutes at major companies and universities. But, there continues to be the risk that history repeats itself: that HCI finds itself primarily reacting to advances in AI [19], rather than being a coequal discipline that exerts pressures that drive advances in AI as well. In this talk, I will propose two conceptual shifts that more explicitly center HCI values in an era of rapid progress in AI: (1) redefining intelligence as agency, the capacity to meaningfully act, rather than the capacity to perform a task; and (2) formulating design as the delegation of constrained agency, rather than solely the specification of affordances.