Emergent Virtual Analytics: Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interactions

The primary focus of this article is a general discussion of the theory and development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and their expanding implications for human interactions and socioeconomic issues. We provide an overview of AI origins and the ubiquitous forms of AI that now saturate our culture, and we discuss the many ways AI is likely to continue to have a pervasive influence on every aspect of our lives. In a separate but directly related article in this issue, we provide an experimental analysis of a current version of an AI in the form of a deep neural network, and we describe how it is able to model and forecast human learning. Throughout this article, we attempt to link common elements in both articles. However, in this article, the emphasis is on a comparison of how cloud-based AI systems impact U.S. citizens and citizens of the European Union in terms of individual rights, security, equitable access, inadvertent machine discrimination, and corporate responsibilities. We note that although AI offers researchers throughout academic disciplines fascinating and previously unimagined explorations and critically important research possibilities, there are areas in which AI systems may be unscrupulously misused.