Why Digital Assistants Need Your Information to Support Your Autonomy

Abstract

This article investigates how human life is conceptualized in the design and use of digital assistants and how this conceptualization feeds back into the life really lived. It suggests that a specific way of conceptualizing human life — namely as a set of tasks to be optimized — is responsible for the much-criticized information hunger of these digital assistants. The data collection of digital assistants raises not just several issues of privacy, but also the potential for improving people’s degree of self-determination, because the optimization model of daily activity is genuinely suited to a certain mode of self-determination, namely the explicit and reflective setting, pursuing, and monitoring of goals. Furthermore, optimization systems’ need for generation and analysis of data overcomes one of the core weaknesses in human capacities for self-determination, namely problems with objective and quantitative self-assessment. It will be argued that critiques according to which digital assistants threaten to reduce their users’ autonomy tend to ignore that the risks to autonomy are derivative to potential gains in autonomy. These critiques are based on an overemphasis of a success conception of autonomy. Counter to this conception, being autonomous does not require a choice environment that exclusively supports a person’s “true” preferences, but the opportunity to engage with external influences, supportive as well as adverse. In conclusion, it will be argued that ethical evaluations of digital assistants should consider potential gains as well as potential risks for autonomy caused by the use of digital assistants.