Towards a Theory of “Use” in the Autonomous Things

I am exited about the publication of my new paper. In this paper, I proposed an alternate notion of “Use” in autonomous things. You can read the paper here: https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2020/57

Here is the abstract of the paper.

The way users perceive and use information system artefacts has been mainly studied from the notion of behavioural believes, cognitive efforts, and deliberate use (e.g., clicking or scrolling) by human actors to produce certain outcomes. The autonomous things, however, do not require deliberate cognitive processes and physical actions to operate. Hence, the existing notions of logical and deliberate use by human actors to produce certain outcomes warrant a revisit. Consequently, drawing on the theories of consciousness and technology adoption, we proposed the notions of conscious use in the context of autonomous things. We argue that unlike the manually operated technologies and systems, the “use” of an autonomous artefact is a state of a user’s consciousness rather than a logical, deliberate cognitive, or somatic activity. A fully autonomous artefact is consciously perceived by users anticipating their needs (through sensory information and situational awareness) without requiring any cognitive efforts, instructions, and physical contact to produce the desired outcomes.

Recommended Citation: Khan, Gohar F., “Towards a Theory of “Use” in the Autonomous Things” (2020). ACIS 2020 Proceedings. 57.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2020/57