What's the point if the conclusion has already been made by the authors? Such "discussion" with a presumed bias becomes merely a statement or an echo chamber.
The goal is stated at the bottom - they take it for granted that no one wants to be ruled by chatbot. The point is to get you to think about what exactly is wrong with this picture, and what that says about the future you wish to see
> It was the goal of this project to show a dystopian future, sensitizing people to undesirable futures while stimulating a discussion about what they wish the future to be like.
Thanks for clarifying, you described this project well.
In my view taking for granted that the role of AI would be bad/dystopian makes it unsuitable to be called a discussion.
Imagine if we switch this topic to immigration in the 1900s, then we'd have a project that take for granted that a country where the majority are immigrants would be dystopian, and the "discussion" would revolve around how to stop migrants from coming in or getting rid of them.
Many times in history we've been blindspotted by quickly applying good/bad dichotomy to every matter, instead of exploring it.
Yes, that was the idea. We're industrial designers, so we thought we'd make a start for that discussion by designing concrete, tangible objects that somehow mirror that dystopian society (the 'aicracy').
I don't think I have ever had a discussion which started from a neutral point of view. The process of discussion was neutral in the sense that all sides were considered equally, but everyone enters the discussion with something in their mind. Which is fair, right? Everyone has looked and thought about the problem, so of course they have an opinion.
The participants of discussion may have biases, but the forum shouldn't.
This project claims to be promoting a discussion, therefore being the forum rather than a participant. If it itself takes a clear position from the start, it has already impaired the debate by turning itself into a participant vs those for the adoption of AI within government.
Unless its understanding of "dystopian" is one that's merely provocative rather than intrinsically evil or needs to be prevented.
The project itself is not a discussion, but responses and reactions to it form a discussion.
As to neutrality being a prerequisite, are you trying to separate the idea of discussion from debate? I feel you may either have different basic definitional ideas than the people you are arguing with.
On this project specifically, and the notion of AI in government in general, and am reminded of a quote about late nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian fiction, “The authors expend all their effort describing the method of distributing resources without expanding on what the fair distribution is.”
I guess my issue is that IMO these explorations of provocative issues are best done with the least amount of prejudice. When we're clouded by repulsion or other emotional states, we might fail to properly analyze the matter at hand.
By declaring the described future as undesirable, the authors' question and wish to stimulate a discussion is clouded with prejudice, IMHO.
> I'm not making a factual claim, what sources can I cite, Plato?
You said that "Neutrality is a prerequisite for discussions". It's factual claim. Do you have a some citation/proof/data that supports your claim? I bet there are plenty papers (or even better, meta-analysis) about discussions.
> It's up to us humans to decide whether discussions are better off taking place within a neutral/biased forum.
First in previous paragraph you stated that every discussion (you didn't specified which ones) needs neutrality and now you state that discussion can take place within biased forum and we should decide which type of discussion we value more aka. one with biased or unbiased forum? Maybe start with deciding which one this two statements is true.
I'm not interested to researching into the research of discussions. You're free to disagree if you think discussions aren't best done within a neutral forum, but I expect most people to have the common sense of seeing the benefit of it.
Which question is a useful opener for a discussion:
- "How can we help Africa end starvation?"
vs
- "Should we send more aid to these ungrateful African countries who have been cozying up to China instead? (Obviously not)".
It should be obvious which is a discussion and which is merely a statement veiled as a rhetorical question. But hey maybe most people can't tell and that's why Fox news still has so many viewers.
Remember that only 18 months or so ago, during the crypto hype, the legal aspect of this was actively touted as some utopic feature of blockchains.