Page Comparison

Lecturers

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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. A.I. features prominently in speculation of Existential Risk (Bostrum, 2002), and the numerous dystopian depictions of societal collapse driven by A.I. 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), A.I. arms race (Moore, 2016), Superintelligence (Bostrom, 1998) andThe Singularity(Chalmers. 2016). There 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 A.I. going in the right direction for the planet and for humanity , instead of the numerous 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 A.I. technology. For this reason, it is critical that we must have an alternative source of visions beyond the solutionism (Morozov, 2013) of Silicon Valley.

Unfortunatly, we are already experiencing some of the dangerous eventualities of Generative A.I. The shift of political discourse to social media has also left our internal and interpersonal realm vulnerable to A.I.-based political manipulation. Yet, AI A.I. is now inseparable from all possible future trajectories: finding a non-zero-sum relationship with AI A.I. is a societal and ecological imperative. But the current spring of A.I. development has certainly sparked out 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 A.I. 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 A.I. support new forms of civic engagement?

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. “the fog of solutionism's false promises, proposing a counter-paradigm: obsoletism, where instead of solving problems, we concentrate our efforts on creating a new world where such problems are made obsolete. ” Morozov

References

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

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

Possible references:

Morozov, Evgeny. "The rise of data and the death of politics." The Guardian 20.07 (2014): 2014.

https://www.peopledemocracy.com/

https://pol.is/home

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

https://vimeo.com/88988762

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Literature

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Donella Meadows: Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System.

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Debra Solomon and Caroline Nevejan: Soil in the city - The Socio-Environmental Substrate.

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María Puig de la Bellacasa: Soil Times - The Pace of Ecological Care.

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1. Georges Perec: Träume von Räumen (Auszug dt.), Espèces d'espace (extrait fr.). (via email)Natasha Myers: A Kria for Cultivating your Inner Plant.

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

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

4. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering

5. Franinovic & Kirschner: Microbiospherians. (via email)

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1. Morton E. O'Kelly: Spatial Interaction.

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

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

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

5. Mol, Arthur P. J., et al. (2018) Zur Umweltsoziologie der Netzwerke und Flows. In: Groß M. (ed) Handbuch Umweltsoziologie. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 140–153Garcia Vargas, Laura, et al. (2022) Geneva: a city of paradoxes and dualities. Diagnostic report on security, surveillance, and digital technologies.

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.

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