Habit, Artificial Intelligence and the Ontological Performance of Trust

Abstract

The rapid growth of AI technologies has led to increased concerns around their perceived trustworthiness. In response, many authors have turned to the predictable rituals and routines of habit as a crucial resource for enhancing trust in these new technologies. This paper revisits the relationship between habit and trust, but from the perspective of the more ontological and dynamic understanding developed on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. We argue that Deleuze's concept of habit challenges the cognitivist emphases of writings on trust and AI, providing a means instead of accounting for trust in terms of an ontological performance that no longer assumes a pre-existing subject. We unpack the implications of such an approach in three main ways. First, we highlight how the originality of Deleuze's approach to habit lies in its insistence that the material contractions of habit enjoy an ontological primacy in relation to the human subject, thus entailing a radically materialist gesture that refuses conventional metaphysical distinctions between the human and the differential forces of matter. Second, we explore how the material contractions of habit, for Deleuze, engender a simultaneous contemplation of an ecology of affects that sit beneath the level of conscious thought. This offers a sense of trust in human–technology relations as being as much an affective capacity as it is a cognitive attitude, being shaped by the performance of unconscious forces and intensities. And finally, we argue that Deleuze's understanding of habit as a fundamentally dynamic process spotlights how trust is itself a creative achievement predicated on an openness to an unknown future. This is important ethically because it pushes understanding of trust in AI beyond a moral didacticism of whether such systems are 'Good' or 'Bad', towards more immanent modes of evaluation sensitive to their capacities to incite new possibilities of thinking and relating.