The Challenges for Understanding Cognitive Bias and Humanity for Well-Being AI — Beyond Machine Intelligence

In this AAAI Spring symposium 2018, we discuss cognitive bias and humanity in the context of well-being AI. We define “well-being AI” as an AI research paradigm for promoting psychological well-being and maximizing human potential. The goals of well-being AI are (1) to understand how our digital experience affects our health and our quality of life and (2) to design well-being systems that put humans at the center. The important challenges of this research are how to quantify subjective things such as happiness, personal impressions, and personal values, and how to transform them into scientific representations with corresponding computational methods. One of the important keywords in understanding machine intelligence in human health and wellness is cognitive bias. Advances in big data and machine learning should not overlook some new threats to enlightened thought, such as the recent trend of social media platforms and commercial recommendation systems being used to manipulate people's inherent cognitive bias. The second important keyword is humanity. Rational thinking, on which early AI researchers had been focused their efforts, is recently and rapidly replacing human thinking by machines. Many people might have begun to believe that irrational thinking is the root of humanity. Empirical and philosophical discussions on AI and humanity would be welcome. This paper describes the detailed motivation, technical, and philosophical challenges of this symposium proposal.