Abstract
As one moves through this book, expect to venture into virgin territory, covering fresh critical conceptual landscapes and innovative theoretical applications. Moore – who is an associate professor at Bentley University in the US – attributes more to PR, and expands the concept of individuality, farther than better known writers have done – and accomplishes this in intellectually stimulating fashion.
Moore envisages that as individuals acquire ‘powerful media devices’, so will future PR relationships become more personal in nature – an assertion that exploding use of social media platforms seems to support. All this does not mean the death of a profession called public relations: Moore argues that if PR were to be abolished today it would immediately reappear called something else – such, Moore contends, is the individual’s need for it.
His assertion features in one of the other (for this reviewer) most interesting chapters, on ‘PR, power and neuroscience’, where he pertinently observes that ‘Desiring PR may be connected to desiring power imbalances’. Other chapters explore PR and individuality; PR, and the inner and exterior lives of individuals; PR’s future: science and the mind; choice’s infinite variety and expanding individuality: from human to machine.
In the light of professional reports and other online analyses of Artificial Intelligence, there is much to engage with in Moore’s latter chapters, particularly where he explores machine individuality and machine to machine PR (chapter 8) and in his follow-on discussion of PR and the fate of individuality (chapter 9).
Turning first to chapter 8, in commenting on ‘artificial agents (AAs), machine learning, AI, and technical, technological and scientific approaches’, Moore – with Protagoras – contends that humans in PR have little chance of remaining ‘the measure of all things’.
As networks increasingly embrace not only humans but also various AI-enabled systems, rendering the locus of control and accountability opaque, Moore may well be right. His subsequent point about the need to accept that ‘change is not fictional or far off’ seems obvious – yet, although there is initial progress, he may be premature in asserting that ‘artificial consciousness is coming [and that] machines [which] will be thinking and feeling before and between themselves. . .will begin a new relationship with communication, including public communication’. Yet some caution is warranted, as ‘early adoption is not always useful’.
Moore is more confronting when he suggests that ‘PR must face the possibility that a machine will be the organization, or the audience, or the PR practitioner, or all three, plus the media and message: an AA equipped with AI, machine learning abilities and above all with a distinct individuality’. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and its Canadian counterpart, in particular, to stimulate professional discussion about the implications of AI implementations, especially ethical implications, I suspect that Moore’s vision is mostly unpalatable to PR as it is now.
He almost acknowledges as much: ‘For many people – PR practitioners included – the notion that machines conscious of their selfhood might need or conduct PR seems distant, irrelevant, outlandish’. Yet it is fair to note that technologies to which those adjectives might once have applied, such as voice-activated systems of all kinds, are now embedded into a wide range of products, from smartphone operating systems to home automation controllers.
This, then, is a challenging work – but as Joyce Rachelle noted, ‘If difficult times teach us the most important lessons, we should then learn to read difficult books’. It will be useful not only to public relations educators and to students at advanced levels of study but also to those who seek to examine PR using a philosophical lens. In a world where PR is mostly thought of in organizational terms and focused on influencing people in the plural, Moore’s thoughtful exploration of PR and individuality is a welcome corrective.