Recently, several large tech companies have pushed the notion of AI assistants into the public debate. These envisioned agents are intended to far outshine current systems, as they are intended to be able to manage our affairs as if they are personal assistants. In turn, this ought to give users a leg up, as one prominent tech exec has put it. However, it remains to be seen how these Personal AI Assistants (PAIAs) are implemented, and critical reflection on how and whether they can be implemented in a responsible way is needed. Currently, such agents are undertheorized and this may cause us to misunderstand their value and capacity. In this paper, we explore and critique the potential for responsible implementation by considering some design requirements based on the notion of meaningful human control. If we desire to have control over such assistants, then we need to be able to do so meaningfully and effectively. In looking at the design requirements, we run into the issue that their broad and differing capacities make any kind of design requirements hard because there are simply no standards to which we can measure PAIAs. Furthermore, it seems that the implementation of these assistants will be a matter of trade-offs both in capacities and in values, which will likely lead to enhancement for some rather than an improvement for all.

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.