Society-in-the-Loop

MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito recently published a thoughtful essay titled "Society-in-the-Loop Artificial Intelligence," and has kindly credited me with coining the term. Now that it is out there, I wanted to elaborate a little on what I mean by "society in the loop," and to highlight the gap that it bridges between the humanities and computing. What I call "society in the loop" is a scaled up version of an old idea that puts the "human in the loop" (HITL) of automated systems. In HITL systems, a human operator is a crucial component of a control system, handling challenging tasks of supervision, exception control, optimization and maintenance. Recently, a number of articles have been written about the importance of applying HITL thinking to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems (e.g. HITL AI has been going on for a while.