Spatial Interaction FS2024

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. 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 organization.

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. 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) and The Singularity (Chalmers. 2016). There are inherently more ways for any system to go wrong than to go right: 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 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 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 is now inseparable from all possible future trajectories: finding a non-zero-sum relationship with AI is a societal and ecological imperative.

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?

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).

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

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

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

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

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

Possible references:

https://www.peopledemocracy.com/

https://pol.is/home

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

https://vimeo.com/88988762

https://www.genevapolicyoutlook.ch/beyond-techno-solutionism-and-silver-bullets/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM&ab_channel=Computerphile

Exercises / Tasks Ideas:

Task 1 Developing a democratic discourse with AI.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLSQa9FolNI&ab_channel=PDDParticipatory%26DeliberativeDemocracyatPSA

Schedule

Literature

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

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

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

4. Meredith Sattler, Carolina Rodriguez. Translating Ecological Systems Models into Generative, Real-Time, Form-Based Visualizations.

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

6. Natasha Myers: A Kria for Cultivating your Inner Plant.

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

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

Further Reading

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. Gillian Barker et al.: Entangled Life. Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences. (2014)

5. Jakob von Uexüll: Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen. Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten. (1956)

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

7. 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

8. Nelson, Mark (2018) Pushing our limits: Insights from Biosphere 2, University of Arizona Press

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

2. Concept (TBA)

3. Milestone presentation prototype 1 (TBA)

4. Vernissage (TBA)