The Chronicle is an ongoing research initiative documenting how people are adapting to AI—through workshops, interviews, story analysis, and direct observation. Our first release offers an exploratory map of emerging psychological patterns.
At the Artificiality Institute, we want to know how to think better with AI. Over the past two and a half years, we've studied how over 1,000 people are adapting to this collision of intelligences. What we found challenges almost everything being said about AI and productivity.
People are forming psychological relationships with AI systems that feel unprecedented to them. The Chronicle maps the psychological changes happening as people incorporate AI into their thinking, creativity, and daily relationships.
An interview wth C. Thi Nguyen about metrification, large scale metrics, about objectivity and judgment, about how this quantification removes the nuance, contextual sensitivity, and variability to make these measurements legible to the state.
AI is based on data. And data is frequently collected with the intent to be quantified, understood, and used across context. That’s why we have things like grade point averages that translate across subject matters and educational institutions. That’s why we perform cost-benefit analyses to normalize the forecasted value of projects—no matter the details. As we deploy more AI that is based on a metrified world, we’re encouraging the quantification of our lives and risk losing the context and subjective value that creates meaning.
In this interview, we talk with C. Thi Nguyen about these large scale metrics, about objectivity and judgment, about how this quantification removes the nuance, contextual sensitivity, and variability to make these measurements legible to the state. And that’s just scratching the surface of this interview.
Thi Nguyen used to be a food writer and is now a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His research focuses on how social structures and technology can shape our rationality and our agency. He writes about trust, art, games, and communities. His book, Games: Agency as Art, was awarded the American Philosophical Association’s 2021 Book Prize.
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Writing and Conversations About AI (Not Written by AI)
