Spatial Interaction FS2024

Image Credit: Stable Diffusion, prompts: image source: "use this image, no king, no crown, short hair, use several voters of the 21st century, they stretch out their arms and hold smartphones over a city“

Lecturers

Dr. Roman Kirschner
(RK), Luke Franzke (LF)

Guests

Dr. Jérôme Duberry (Geneva Graduate Institute), Ramona Sprenger (Dezentrum)

Timeframe

The module takes place over 6 weeks, from 30. April to 7. June 2024. See the timetable below for detailed hours and classrooms. Class sessions include lectures, discussions, mentoring sessions, in-class exercises, assignments and independent study blocks. Projects are conducted in a team of four students at most.

Room

During the seminar, a limited number of workbenches are available in Werkstatt Modellbau ZT 2.E20-UU.

Overview and Objectives

The module 'Spatial Interaction' challenges students to deepen their practical and conceptual knowledge of human interactions in their immediate surroundings with a focus on public space. Starting from a location in Zurich, students will develop spatial-technical frameworks for situated interactions. The student projects will connect people and societal processes.

Topic 2024: AI, Democracy and Public Space

As artificial intelligence begins to infiltrate various aspects of public life, from surveillance systems to algorithmic decision-making, it brings opportunities and challenges for democratic societies. Amongst privacy, surveillance, bias, and authorship concerns, it becomes easy to imagine an expanse of dystopian futures. AI features prominently in speculation of Existential Risk (Bostrum, 2002), and the numerous dystopian depictions of societal collapse driven by AI in science fiction provides plenty of material for anxiety. Many of these speculative horror scenarios are entering the everyday parlance of technology: the Alignment Problem (Gabriel, 2020), AI arms race (Moore, 2016), Superintelligence (Bostrom, 1998) and The Singularity (Chalmers. 2016). Such concerns will always outnumber the list of positives: there are inherently more ways for any system to go wrong than to go right. But how do we increase the chance of our future with AI going in the right direction for the planet and for humanity instead of the infinite ways to go wrong? Many of the utopian scenarios being provided to us, however, come from people and organisations that stand the most to profit from the rapid and uncontrolled uptake of AI technology. For this reason, we must have an alternative source of visions beyond the solutionism (Morozov, 2013) of Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, we are already experiencing some of the dangerous eventualities of AI: the shift of political discourse to social media has left our internal and interpersonal realm vulnerable to AI-based political manipulation through deep fakes and out-of-control algorithms driving radicalization (Ledwich et al., 2019). Yet, AI is now inseparable from all possible future trajectories: finding a non-zero-sum relationship with AI is a societal and ecological imperative. But the current spring of AI development has certainly sparked our imagination: projects like Polis leverage AI to find out what large numbers of people think about issues in their own words to better shape public policy. Augmented Democracy tries to use AI for radical new forms of direct democracy through a virtual twin.

But what about the historically central sphere of political and democratic discourse: the public space? Could this be our great chance to re-design a relationship with AI that is symbiotic and aligned with the needs of humans and non-human ecologies? Can AI support new forms of civic engagement? Can it help to give us better access to knowledge embedded in our environment? Can it help us to understand the manifold perspectives and life situations that clash and try to find compromises in a city?

In this module, we will build experimental futures for democracy in a spatial context. The course will work in collaboration with researchers from the SNF project “Stories of the Future”, a scientific communication project which aims to sensitize young people in Switzerland to the political and ethical nature of AI.

Schedule

References AI & solutionism (from introductory text above)

Bostrom, Nick (2002) Existential risks: Analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards. Journal of Evolution and Technology 9.

Gabriel, Iason (2020) Artificial intelligence, values, and alignment. Minds and machines 30.3 : 411-437.

Geist, Edward Moore (2016) It’s already too late to stop the AI arms race—We must manage it instead. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 72.5: 318-321.

Bostrom, Nick (1998) How long before superintelligence. International Journal of Futures Studies 2.1: 1-9.

Chalmers, David J. (2016) The singularity: A philosophical analysis. Science fiction and philosophy: From time travel to superintelligence : 171-224.

Schüll, Natasha Dow (2013) The folly of technological solutionism: An interview with Evgeny Morozov.

Ledwich, Mark, and Anna Zaitsev (2019) Algorithmic extremism: Examining YouTube's rabbit hole of radicalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.11211.

Literature

1. Georges Perec: Träume von Räumen (Auszug dt.), Espèces d'espace (extrait fr.). (via email)

2. Bourdieu, Pierre (1989) Sozialer Raum, symbolischer Raum. In: Dünne J., Raumtheorie - Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, Suhrkamp 2006, 354-368. (via email)

3. Asenbaum, Hans (2020) Spatial Theory of Democracy. Talk given at Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Webinar 5: “Democracy & Space” [min 06:10-18:08].

4. Voss, Jan Peter (2020) The McDonaldization of Democracy: Translocal Space-making by innovating “deliberative mini-publics”. Talk given at Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Webinar 5: “Democracy & Space” [min 18:45-35:33].

5. Garcia Vargas, Laura, et al. (2022) Geneva: a city of paradoxes and dualities. Diagnostic report on security, surveillance, and digital technologies.

6. Mendel, Maria (2019) The spatial ways democracy works: On the pedagogy of common places. Why, why now? https://doi.org/10.1177/0034523719839

7. Duberry, Jérôme (2022) Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: Risks and Promises of AI-Mediated Citizen–Government Relations.

8. Duberry, Jérôme (2023) Beyond Techno-solutionism and silver bullets.

9. Sprenger, Ramona (2023) Do not feed the google.

10. Morozov, Evgeny (2014) PUBLIC SPACE // Shared Spaces with Evgeny Morozov.

11. Morozov, Evgeny (2014) The rise of data and the death of politics.

12. https://platform.openAIcom/docs/guides/prompt-engineering

13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy

Further Reading

1. O'Kelly, Morton E. (2014) Spatial Interaction.

2. Weaver, Duncan (2020) Spatiality and World Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.562

3. Baccini, et. al.(2012) Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design, MIT Press

4. González de Molina, Manuel, et al. (2014) The Social Metabolism: A Socio-Ecological Theory of Historical Change, Springer

5. Massey, Doreen (2009) Concepts of space and power in theory and in political practice, Documents d'anàlisi geogràfica 55, 15-26

6. Mol, Arthur P. J., et al. (2018) Zur Umweltsoziologie der Netzwerke und Flows. In: Groß M. (ed) Handbuch Umweltsoziologie. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 140–153

Mentoring

We will prepare doodles for mentoring with time slots of different lengths depending on the progress of the overall project. Reserve your slot and try to be on time. Questions can be asked anytime – also via email.

Presentations

1. Task Results (AI Mirror, Experimental Debate) (TBA)

2. Concept (TBA)

3. Milestone presentation prototype 1 (TBA)

4. Vernissage (5.6.)