AI, Indeterminism and Good Storytelling

Can the AI system foretell the precise moment that you’re going to have an accident, how damaged your car (and perhaps your body) might be, etc.? No, nothing quite so precise as all that. Instead, the system will offer probabilities, and in large numbers (lots of drivers, lots of road time) the insurance company can probably rely on those probabilities to make quite precise estimates about the collective number of accidents they’ll need to cover, how expensive they’ll be, what kinds of people will get into those accidents, and so forth.

While we’re quite accustomed to these probabilistic models for insurance, loans and the like (courtesy of the actuarial sciences), AI is upping the ante—potentially even changing the game. AI is bringing probabilistic models into areas that they’ve never been before, and that doesn’t always sit easily with our human desire for clean, causal narratives. As humans, we like deterministic stories: ones where the narrative shows that things had to unfold the way they do. We don’t like “open loops:” questions that never get answered, gaps in the story that never resolve. Probabilistic, indeterministic systems don’t offer that.

In this piece, I’ll explore some historical forebears to the illustrate that current, AI-focused discussions about indeterminism, are not new, but, given the revolutionary potential of AI may require further, deeper reflection. To complement the historical analysis, I will provide a few contemporary examples and try to draw some tangible insights about the societal and social challenges that AI-driven decision-making may engender as it becomes engrained in daily life.

In sum, I aim to contribute to ongoing discussions about AI will influence the course of human societies, both what problems it will solve and what problems it will blow wide open. And specifically I want to do that by bringing in some historical perspective.