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Lecturers

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

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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 where public life and „tamed nature“ overlap, students will develop spatial-technical frameworks for situated interactions. The student projects will connect people and environmental processes with the aim of investigating local impacts of urban (or everyday?) behaviour as well as long-distance effects of individual actions. They will learn how to interface the present mesocosm (collecting environmental data, identifying relationships) and how to anticipate/experiment with advanced techniques like remote sensing or machine vision. Designing in such situations requires the development of strategies for public outreach and communication as well as basic knowledge of intervening in complex systems. Students will work in groups and in a form of self-governed organizationsocietal processes.

Topic 2024: AI, Democracy and Public Space (Draft)

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. AI features prominently in speculation of Existential Risk (Bostrum, 2002), and the numerous dystopian depictions of societal collapse driven by A.I. 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), A.I. AI arms race (Moore, 2016), Superintelligence (Bostrom, 1998) andThe 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 A.I. 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 A.I. AI technology. For this reason, we must have an alternative source of visions beyond the solutionism (Morozov, 2013) of Silicon Valley.

UnfortunatlyUnfortunately, we are already experiencing some of the dangerous eventualities of A.I. AI The shift of political discourse to social media has also left our internal and interpersonal realm vulnerable to A.I.AI-based political manipulation through deep fakes and out-of-control algorithms driving radicalization (Ledwich et al., 2019). Yet, A.I. AI is now inseparable from all possible future trajectories: finding a non-zero-sum relationship with A.I. AI is a societal and ecological imperative. But the current spring of A.I. 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 A.I. 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 A.I. 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.

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Task 1 Developing a democratic discourse with AI.

Task 2 Creating a political AI Mirror: The AI decides the nature of the 2nd exercise.

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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 ()

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

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

6. https://platform.openai.comopenAIcom/docs/guides/prompt-engineering

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

Further Reading

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

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1. Exercise Results (Spatialize, Vegetalize, Leverage Points) (TBA)

2. Concept (TBA)

3. Milestone presentation prototype 1 (TBA)

4. Vernissage (TBA5.6.)