THE HAPPINESS ROUNDTABLE
HAPPINESS ROUNDTABLE | AI & WELL-BEING WHO’S WHO | 2020
HAPPINESS ROUNDTABLE IS A PROJECT OF THE HAPPINESS ALLIANCE
Happiness Roundtable AI & Well-being 2020 brings direction and inspiration to the nexus of artificial intelligence & wellbeing. It asks and answers two questions:
How will AI positively impact community well-being at the individual, collective, corporate and governance level? How do we achieve better alignment between existing incentive structures for AI and well-being?
The Happiness Roundtable AI & Well-being 2020 is inspired by the call for a new area of research, investigation and action
Artificial Intelligence and Community Well-being: A Proposal for an Emerging Area of Research https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42413-019-00054-6
Special Issue: Intersections of Artificial Intelligence and Community WellBeing Volume 3, issue 4, December 2020
https://link.springer.com/journal/42413/volumes-and-issues/3-4
CESAR BAIO
Cesar Baio is a CAPES scholar whose post-doctoral work at i-DAT (Plymouth University, U.K.) focused on data and the city. He is Associate Professor of Art and Technology at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) and the director of actLAB (LaboratĂłrio de Pesquisa em Arte, CiĂŞncia e Tecnologia). With a background in electronics and media studies, he works as an artist and researcher to examine the relationship between art, technology and society. Along with artist Lucy HG Solomon, he forms the collective Cesar & Lois.
LUCY HG SOLOMON
Lucy HG Solomon is a 2021 Fulbright scholar whose global project probes microbiological connections across distant terrains. An associate professor in the Department of Art, Media and Design at California State University San Marcos, she teaches at the intersection of media, data and the environment and leads the DaTA Lab (Laboratory for Data and Transdisciplinary Art). She is a co-founder of the art collective, The League of Imaginary Scientists, and one-half of Cesar & Lois, a collective with Cesar Baio.
CESAR & LOIS ART COLLECTIVE
Cesar & Lois probes the evolution of humanity’s relationship to nature by advancing intersections and parallels between technological and biological systems. Consisting of Lucy HG Solomon (CA, USA) and Cesar Baio (SP, Brazil), Cesar & Lois endeavors to think with nonhuman networks. Their creative scholarship on artificial intelligences aspires to reroute machine thinking to more equitable sharing of resources and information: the logic sourced in microbiological systems. The duo ponders microbio-logic, the logic based in the growth of those microbiological organisms, and studies how this can inform human logic, with the goal of positing new equitable systems for a postanthropocentric future. Cesar & Lois received the Lumen Prize in Artificial Intelligence (2018), were finalists for Singapore’s Global Digital Art Prize (2019) and were selected as artists in residence at Coalesce Center for Biological Arts (2020) and UC Davis Hess Laboratory (2021). cesarandlois.org.
CESAR & LOIS ART COLLECTIVE’S VISION
The art collective Cesar & Lois creates artworks that orient artificial intelligences to microbiological beings, with the idea that those organisms’ decentralized logic offers opportunities to rethink AI. We imagine how an AI based in nonhuman systems could make decisions based on global ecosystems and distant populations better than anthropocentric models of artificial neural networks. The emergence of multiple crises, including climate change, loss of political representation, civil wars and the plight of refugees, is evidence that a new kind of consciousness is required. In our article, we advocate for an ecosystemic artificial intelligence (EAI), a networked consciousness. This means that we have to learn not only how to think as individuals but how to think together, and across human and nonhuman systems. This networked thinking challenges the dualisms of modernity and human exceptionalism. To bring about this radical shift in our societies, we have to rethink and rebuild our technological systems based on a concept of community well-being that is multi-species and ecosystemic.
SANTI CAMPS
Santi Camps is a software engineer and serial entrepreneur. Starting his adventure quality management system KMKey.com he has moved to the Tourism sector founding Mabrian (a Travel Intelligence platform) and also applying his knowledge and vision to Naveler (same concept applied to politics) and to some early stage projects based on AI trading.
SANTI’S VISION Starting with the first humans, technology always has been a powerful transformation tool that has changed the way of life of the humanity several times until to arrive to our days. Seeing this back with some perspective, the general well-being achieved for a so big population is amazing. Nowadays any medium-level person living in Europe has a better life that any King had 1000 years before. I only can see two objectives in this process: 1) On one hand, the distribution of each productivity improvement hasn’t been easy, and sometimes had to be dramatic, only achieved through big protests and revolutions. 2) On the other hand, a continuous increment of population is something pushing in the opposite direction of humans well-being and planet sustainability. Now we have the opportunity to do things better with a technology that could have, perhaps, the biggest impact ever in humans life: Artificial Intelligence. We also should remember that, as much important as technology is the competition between us (or similar incentives) to make things happen. So, for me, the key question to align AI and well-being is to elaborate the right incentives system. At a first glance, it seems we might look for a way to assign a monetary value to well-being (it could have a direct translation to a minor-cost of sanity systems, for instance). Or, if we are not able to find the way, at least promote from the governments the AI improvements aligned with that well-being.
MAREK HAVRDA
Marek Havrda is Director of AI Policy & Social Impacts at GoodAI, a private AI R&D company. Marek is a member of ONE AI (OECD Network of Experts on AI). He also actively contributes to international AI ethics and governance initiatives including IEEE Ethically Aligned Design, Global Governance of AI Roundtable, International Congress for the Governance of AI and AI4EU. He is a member of the Regulatory Impact Assessment Board of the Czech Government. He served as an advisor to the Czech Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Education. Marek is on a long-term personal leave from the European Commission, where he focused on Impact Assessment, Behavioral Insights, consumer protection, sustainability, and innovation policy. He held leadership or consultancy positions at non-profit and private sectors. He studied at Charles University, Central European University, Warwick Business School, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University
MAREK’S VISION
Covid-19 provides „Sputnik Moment“ not only in terms of our technical and organizational preparedness to deal with large impact situations, but maybe even more importantly in terms of values. When expressed in monetary terms, McKisney found that the pandemic’s negative impact on well-being was almost 3.5 times the losses in GDP. The calculation was based on the amount of money people would need to be given to offset the perceived decline in happiness. The main contributing factor was reduced satisfaction with relationships. The well-being lens might guide our reflection on values. To build on a well-being approach also means to deal with many uncertainties and trade-offs. AI could help us develop and assess scenarios in terms of their potential to increase well-being and also alert us to various trade-offs. I suggest we start with scenarios of automation. To-date the main driver of automation has been economics. The aim would be to focus public investments in research and innovation towards automating tasks which have the highest potential in terms of well-being. Also directly related to automation, the scenarios could help guide publicly financed job creation support and related parts of fiscal stimulus packages, in order to focus concrete upskilling efforts in line with expected impact on the well-being of employees. Such AI-powered scenarios would allow us to discuss potential futures, their impacts and related probabilities. This approach would also significantly increase our ability of quantitative decision-making. Our communities and their leaders would become empowered to discuss expected benefits as well as costs of todays’ actions.
JUSTIN HOLLANDER
Justin is a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. His research and teaching is in the areas of physical planning, Big Data, shrinking cities, and the intersection between cognitive science, happiness, and the design of cities. He co-edited the book Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm (Routledge, 2020) and is the author of seven other books on urban planning and design, including Cognitive Architecture Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (with Ann Sussman) and Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities. He was recently inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners and hosts the Apple podcast “Cognitive Urbanism�.
JUSTIN’S VISION My vision for community well-being in the face of COVID-19 is that it demands a fundamental reorganization of how we, as professionals and scholars, interact with information and knowledge. For a century, community planners and policy professionals have drawn on social science research methods to understand what is happening in communities, from surveys to interviews, from statistical analysis of administrative data sets to qualitative coding of public meeting minutes. But the information age has come and future planning will need to engage with the digital crumbs people leave behind as they browse the web, post on social media, or text from their phone. The pandemic has moved so much of our lives online and not everything we do is going back to in-person modalities. The massive new sources of insight into where people spend time, what they think of their lives and their communities, and how they travel, require a new set of data collection and analysis techniques for community wellbeing practitioners and scholars to understand the places they live and work in.
LAURA MUSIKANSKI
Laura is the executive director the Happiness Alliance (happycounts.org). She co-authored The Happiness Policy Handbook as well as Happiness, Well-being and Sustainability: A Course in Systems Change and other books and articles. Laura is a member of the editorial board for Springer Journal's International Journal of Community Well-being. She served as vice chair for the Well-being Committee of IEEE’s Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and chair for IEEE Standard 7010 Recommended Practice for Assessing the Impact of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems on Human Well-Being. Laura is a lawyer with an MBA and certifications in environmental management as well as environmental law and regulation - her version of a sustainability education before one was available.
LAURA’S VISION
Never before has the role of metrics been so pressing as with AI, given how it is influencing every aspect of our lives - from the work place to health care, policing and surveillance, to how business is conducted and how governments are run. AI accelerates the impacts of the Anthropocine era, and so we must choose which impacts we want to accentuate and which we want to decelerate. We do this with metrics because what we measure is what we manage, what we care about, and what we get. We have the opportunity to realize well-being for communities, happiness for individuals (happiness in terms of eudaimonia or flourishing and self-actualizing) and sustainability for our planet through our ever increasing adoption and use of AI, or accelerate the destruction of our own species - and that of many others.
ANNA PETTINI
Anna is Associate Professor at the University of Florence since December 2003 (habilitation to full professorship 2014). She works at the School of Political Sciences and serves as President of the degree course in Political Sciences, Vice-president of the School in Political Sciences “Cesare Alfieri�; Scientific director of DataLifeLab and Coordinator of the Master in Digital Transformation. She is a member of the Department of Economics and Business Sciences. She teaches microeconomics and public economics, industrial economics, labor economics, advanced microeconomics and mathematical methods for economics. Her research spans from ethics and economics, to optimal taxation theory, economics of the family, price and quality discrimination; current research topics: well-being and mental health, multidimensional measures of wellbeing, community well- being
ANNA’S VISION "The coronavirus, with its economic and social fallout, is a time machine for the future. The changes that many of us predicted for the next few decades are instead happening in a matter of weeks." (New York Times, March 2020) The pandemic has brought to the surface all the fragilities that the research on well-being had long highlighted, but which the functioning of the economic system did not allow to be addressed. In Europe, the marginalisation of the role of the state in the economy, which began in the 1990s, weakened the pillars of the welfare state, first and foremost the national health service, which proved to be undersized. The increasing lack of attention to prevention, which is electorally unprofitable, has become clear for all to see. Plans for a pandemic existed, but were not followed up or activated. Inequalities between guaranteed and non-guaranteed workers, between workers with stable and regular contracts and those without, have become the cause of new poverty. The hypotheses that science is investigating on the anthropic origin of the virus have brought attention back to the risks linked to the organisation of the entire world economic system: from intensive livestock farming to the length of value chains, our hyper-connected, hyper-crowded world, bent on the creation of financial wealth, has shown itself in all its fragility. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, 75% of people say they feel more socially isolated than before, 67% feel more stressed, 57% feel more anxious and 53% say they feel emotionally exhausted.
Is this the legacy we have built up over the last few decades? The pandemic could be a great opportunity for a change of pace, and this would be guaranteed by an overhaul of the way we measure the growth and strength of a country. GDP, as we have all known for decades, only measures material production, without calculating the value of the natural and human inputs that are "degraded" in the industrial process, thus giving a distorted view of the progress of nations and the activities of companies. It defines progress as a set of market transactions, regardless of whether they are beneficial to society or not. GDP not only conceals environmental costs, but also social costs, including inequality, crime, stress and family disintegration. Only transactions that take place in the formal economy are included in GDP, and all informal, voluntary economic activities are ignored. Thus, societies are encouraged to commercialise social life, limiting leisure and recreation and supporting industrialisation driven by big business. Between a shopping mall, which increases the profits and expenditures counted by GDP, and a public park, which is free and therefore does not appear in GDP (although it may improve the well-being of users and thus contribute to the overall economic performance of society), the policy choice almost always falls on the former. GDP is not just a number, but also a powerful institution supporting the current economic system: it conditions political and social preferences and behaviour. Alternative measures, from the GPI to more complex multidimensional indicators such as the European Commission's Better Life Index or the Italian BES, must replace the single index that all states chase after, and become the measure of our lives. Advances in artificial intelligence systems and data science can help us make them operational. This should be the number one goal of all economies worthy of being called advanced economies.
BOGDANA RAKOVA
Bogdana is a data scientist at the Responsible AI team at Accenture, research fellow at Partnership on AI and board of directors member of the Happiness Alliance. She was lead contributor to the IEEE 7010 Recommended Practice for Assessing the Impact of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems on Human Well-Being. She was involved in the Assembly: Ethics and Governance of AI program in 2018, a collaboration between the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the MIT Media Lab, a research engineer at the Think Tank Team innovation lab at Samsung Research, a student and later a teaching fellow at Singularity University, also a startup co-founder in the intersection of AI, Future of Work, and Manufacturing
BOGDANA’S VISION: The future recognizes that social and ecological justice are inseparable. Well-being measurement frameworks empower social and environmental change through response-able systems that enable participation and inclusion facilitated by data and AI governance frameworks. I embrace a radical speculative futures framing where well-being impact assessments have become widely accepted and adopted as the industry standard for research and development of AI-based systems. The measurement and consideration of well-being is embraced and incentivized by governments, corporations, academia, civil society, and others as a core aspect of their work. The broad definition of well-being allows for practitioners and researchers to account for and protect the multidimensional aspects of human agency and identity in the repeated interactions between people and AI systems. Well-being indicator frameworks allow for the consideration of future people while also acknowledging the past legacy of existing power structures. Practically, AI well-being impact assessments provide (1) a means of measuring and assessing the impacts of AI on community well-being, (2) the engagement of communities in the development, deployment and management of AI, and (3) the creation of AI that improves community wellbeing and safeguards communities from social, ecological, economic and other threats such as climate change, dismantling of democracy, destabilizing economic inequality, and decimation of natural resources.
PAUL ROGERS
Paul’s PhD centered on tourism, conservation and development issues in Nepal’s Sagarmatha (Mt Everest) National Park. He has over 20 years’ experience as a tourism advisor to national and local governments and tourism organisations, and has worked in more than a dozen countries in South and South-East Asia, Africa and Australia. His focus has been on the policy and planning arena – on using tourism, as one of the world’s largest and fastest growing industries that provides 1 in every 10 jobs worldwide, as a vehicle for development. Paul’s interest in the GNH agenda began with his work as a tourism advisor to the Government of Bhutan, and really ignited through his participation in the “High Level Meeting on Happiness & Wellbeing” at the UN in April 2012, where he represented the UN World Tourism Organisation.
PAUL’S VISION Prior to COVID-19, systemic weaknesses within tourism management processes led to overtourism as: (1) businesses clamoured for profits; (2) governments celebrated ‘USPs’ and ‘KPIs’ (mainly visitor arrivals and revenues); and (3) visitors sought their next enviable selfie. In this mix of priorities, host communities have been progressively disenfranchised. The Covid19 pandemic has put business as usual on hold and opened the door for innovation, for destinations to deliver the promise of the UN SDGs. With families and households in Bali left starving, and the loss of some 120 million jobs worldwide, few sectors have been hit harder than travel and tourism. We need to build back better, fitter, stronger. Urgently. A fundamental goal of Planet Happiness (a tourism and BIG DATA project of the Happiness Alliance) is to position the well-being of host communities front and centre. Inspired by innovations in digital governance and democracy, my vision is to design and deliver AI systems to expand the purpose and potential of contact-tracing apps. Innovation is needed to build an OECD recognised well-being survey (the Happiness Index) into contract-tracing apps that are connected, in real-time, to multi-facing governance dashboards that enable: (1) the identification the clusters of vulnerable individuals, households and communities according to our well-being criteria (psychological health, economic crisis, and social exclusion, for example); and (2) the introduction of ‘citizen-science projects’ and the co-creation of policies and interventions to, for example: address the vulnerabilities of exposed, at-risk groups; •deliver greater stakeholder alignment and confidence in regenerative tourism systems; •avoid overtourism and enable greater equity, inclusivity and sustainability in destination management; and •shorten stakeholder feedback loops to refine and strengthen governance systems.
JONATHAN STRAY
Jonathan is a research fellow at the Partnership on AI, where he works on the design of recommender systems for pro-social outcomes. He previously taught the dual masters degree in computer science and journalism at Columbia University and built document mining software for investigative journalism. He has worked as an editor at the Associated Press and a research scientist at Adobe Systems, and holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and an MA in Journalism from the University of Hong Kong.
JONATHAN’S VISION Recommender systems drive YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, LinkedIn and their global equivalents. These are our new machine gatekeepers. and choose the posts we see, the news we read, the products suggested for purchase. Right now they are all driven by behavioral metrics — what we click on, share, like, comment, also known as “engagement.” This is easy to measure, and correlates with both revenue and value for the users — a system that no one wants to use isn’t helping anybody. The catch is that engagement is very incomplete measure. It’s very much like GDP in this regard: it’s easy to measure, but misses so much about what it means to have a flourishing society. The simplest alternative is simply asking people about how these systems are affecting their wellbeing. And this is exactly the work we are undertaking at PAI in 2021, developing concrete methods in collaboration with our industry, civil society, and academic partners. I want to make three changes: 1) Adopt well-being metrics to measure human outcomes in specific domains. Consider, for example, measuring the well-being effects of a news recommendation system, like Google News. How to we think about news diet in terms of well-being? Some existing frameworks have civic engagement measures like voter turnout, but we need more granular outcomes to really drive these systems. For example, I am studying measures of diversity and polarization. Whereas for an online shopping system such as Amazon, we will want other measures, for example the carbon footprint of products sold. 2) Use this information to drive both managerial and algorithmic decisions. I’d like to see well being measures adopted as KPIs, the key performance indicators that are often used in management. So product managers might look to well being measures when testing product changes. But there are also emerging methods to use real-time well-being data — for example from ongoing user surveys — to algorithms directly. 3) Understand that these metrics have to change. No metric can be static. You’ve probably heard of Goodhart’s law, the idea that any measure that becomes a target changes its meaning. Moreover, the world changes. One of the things was saw with COVID-19 was that the all sorts of machine learning models broke, as people changed their behavior — where they went, what they did. So metrics will never be set-and forget — we have to constantly re-evaluate them. So: - Adopt well-being metrics to measure human outcomes in specific domains. - Use this information to drive both managerial and algorithmic decisions - Understand that these metrics have to change
THE HAPPINESS ROUNDTABLE IS CONVENED WITH THREE GOALS IN MIND
BUILDING COMMUNITY AMONG HAPPINESS ROUNDTABLE MEMBERS
DEVELOPING AND SHARING IDEAS AND VISIONS
PRODUCING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GLOBAL AND LOCAL ACTION
The Happiness Roundtable is a project of the Happiness Alliance.