In this paper, we describe our efforts to appropriate an autono-preneurial agent—in this case, the Amazon Locust—through the development of an API that enables equitable and socially aware entrepreneurial decision making on the part of the Locust. We present a new API and our intended vision for this system, along with our proposed deployment plan for implementing appropriated Locusts in Midwestern USA suburban communities. These appropriated Locusts will allow community provisioning decision-making that moves beyond consideration of profitability to also include decisions based on equity, equality, community, and interpersonal relationships. We discuss the broader implications of this work and point toward future areas of inquiry.

1. AUSTIN L. TOOMBS1, DEREK WHITLEY2, & COLIN M. GRAY1
1PURDUE UNIVERSITY; 2INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Autono-preneurial Agents
in the Community:
Developing a Socially Aware API for
Autonomous Entrepreneurial Lawn Mowers
EMI
2040
10th Annual ACM Conference on
Explainable Machine Intelligence

2. Amazon Locust
Autonomous Entreprenurial
Autono-prenurial
(Chesterton, 2024)

3. Amazon Locust
(out of box, makes decisions
based on profit margins)
SocialAwareness
API
+
End-User Adaptations of AI Agents

4. Amazon Locust
(out of box, makes decisions
based on profit margins)
SocialAwareness
API
+
An Amazon Locust
that decides which
lawns to mow based
on more than just profit
=
End-User Adaptations of AI Agents

5. Modified Locust
<

6. Modified Locust
<

7. Related Work
Social acceptability of autonomous agents operating as
revenue-collecting community members
Studies of the emotional labor expected from—
and performed by—autonomous agents
Popular press, political, and legal conversations about the
personhood of artificially intelligent agents
Studies of the adoption of community service provisioning
applications like Lendr and NeighborGood.
Find more in the paper!

8. Off-the-Shelf
Profit & Bids Energy Use
Time & Distance Wear & Tear

9. Off-the-Shelf API Modifications
Community
Equality
= Equitability
Relationship
Profit & Bids Energy Use
Time & Distance Wear & Tear

10. Human-in-the-Loop Visualizations

11. Provocation
Autono-preneurial
agents have the
potential to be linchpins
for community activism

12. Provocation
Autono-preneurial
agents have the
potential to be linchpins
for community activism
Question
Can a service as mundane as lawn mowing help bring
people together in a community? (as opposed to
reinforcing capitalist production)
Design Exploration
How could such a service be owned by the community,
rather than by individuals?

13. Future Plans

14. AUSTIN L. TOOMBS1, DEREK WHITLEY2, & COLIN M. GRAY1
1PURDUE UNIVERSITY; 2INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Autono-preneurial Agents
in the Community:
Developing a Socially Aware API for
Autonomous Entrepreneurial Lawn Mowers

15. Explore Something
Interesting
Value-motivated end user
modifications of decision-
making systems that come
baked into off-the-shelf
technologies
Our Design Fiction Approach
Ground Ourselves in
a Familiar Context
An almost-bland work in
progress paper that
translates the thing of
interest into something-that-
can-be-studied by
HCI-like researchers
Futuristic, Yet Rooted
in 2020 Systems
Autonomous agents that
can sell their own services,
participating in 2020
conceptions of gig economy

16. World-Building Approach
(Selected) Fictional References (Selected) Real References
Laura Forlano. 2016. Decentering the Human in the
Design of Collaborative Cities. Design Issues
Joseph Seering, Michal Luria, Geoff Kaufman, and
Jessica Hammer. 2019. Beyond Dyadic Interactions:
Considering Chatbots as Community Members. CHI
Jennifer Sensiba. 2019. The Robot Gig Economy:
Will It Pay Off For Tesla Owners? CleanTechnica
Shankar Vedantam. 2019. Why It’s Time To Think
About Self-Driving Cars In Regards To Parking. NPR

17. Amazon Locust
(out of box, makes decisions
based on profit margins)
An Amazon Locust
that decides which
lawns to mow based
on more than just profit
SocialAwareness
API
+ =
Semi-Utopic, World-Building Approach

18. Community
Informatics
Cognitive
Robotics
Design
Ethics
+ +

19. AUSTIN L. TOOMBS
toombsa@purdue.edu
DEREK WHITLEY
dcwhitle@iu.edu
COLIN M. GRAY
gray42@purdue.edu
Thank You!
This research was funded in part by National
Science Foundation Grant No. #1657310