Within current debates about the future impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on human society, roughly three different perspectives can be recognised: (1) the technology-centric perspective, claiming that AI will soon outperform humankind in all areas, and that the primary threat for humankind is superintelligence; (2) the human-centric perspective, claiming that humans will always remain superior to AI when it comes to social and societal aspects, and that the main threat of AI is that humankind’s social nature is overlooked in technological designs; and (3) the collective intelligence-centric perspective, claiming that true intelligence lies in the collective of intelligent agents, both human and artificial, and that the main threat for humankind is that technological designs create problems at the collective, systemic level that are hard to oversee and control. The current paper offers the following contributions: (a) a clear description for each of the three perspectives, along with their history and background; (b) an analysis and interpretation of current applications of AI in human society according to each of the three perspectives, thereby disentangling miscommunication in the debate concerning threats of AI; and (c) a new integrated and comprehensive research design framework that addresses all aspects of the above three perspectives, and includes principles that support developers to reflect and anticipate upon potential effects of AI in society.

Most explainable AI (XAI) research projects focus on well-delineated topics, such as interpretability of machine learning outcomes, knowledge sharing in a multi-agent system or human trust in agent’s performance. For the development of explanations in human-agent teams, a more integrative approach is needed. This paper proposes a perceptual-cognitive explanation (PeCoX) framework for the development of explanations that address both the perceptual and cognitive foundations of an agent’s behavior, distinguishing between explanation generation, communication and reception. It is a generic framework (i.e., the core is domain-agnostic and the perceptual layer is model-agnostic), and being developed and tested in the domains of transport, health-care and defense. The perceptual level entails the provision of an Intuitive Confidence Measure and the identification of the “foil” in a contrastive explanation. The cognitive level entails the selection of the beliefs, goals and emotions for explanations. Ontology Design Patterns are being constructed for the reasoning and communication, whereas Interaction Design Patterns are being constructed for the shaping of the multimodal communication. First results show (1) positive effects on human’s understanding of the perceptual and cognitive foundation of agent’s behavior, and (2) the need for harmonizing the explanations to the context and human’s information processing capabilities.