Democracy In AI/With AI: Critical Storytelling

“AI really is an uncaring technology”, says one of the participants of our workshop at DRIVE, organised by CLICKNL for the Dutch Design Week. Together with Meike Hardt, a fellow PhD researcher from AI DeMoS Lab, we were set to imagine a world where AI helped to create and maintain a more caring society. However, the proposed task turned out to be harder than it first appeared.

On March 15, we at AI DeMoS Lab held our first workshop called Moments of Reading: {AI, Design, Democracy}. For this workshop, we wanted to think about how the key three concepts for our lab – AI, design, and democracy – can co-exist with one another since relations between them engender certain ways of thinking and foreclose others.

There is no surprise in the algorithm providing an erroneous output. In certain cases, such errors lead to harm, such as when facial recognition algorithms misrecognize the person, which leads to their detainment. When such mistakes occur, there is an often-occurring impulse to somehow ‘fix’ the algorithm, to minimize the probability of error in various ways by resorting to technical and social interventions. While the potential of an algorithmic error seems inescapable, it is surprising that rarely do such mistakes take as beyond thinking of the algorithm itself as a decision-making device.

The relationship between politics and friendship in the political and ethical philosophy has been an intimate one. The shared commonalities engendered by friendliness have been seen by many as a necessary condition for meaningful collective life. Aristotle famously distinguished between different types of friendship, pointing our attention to its role in holding the polities together. At the same time, our connections today increasingly are mediated by social media that shape how we share the common world with each other – and build a friendship as a result.

As concerns about the impact of AI on contemporary polities proliferate, so do ways to address the democratic deficit of these technologies. Increasingly, the issues of bias, accountability, transparency, and discrimination come to the forefront of public discussions on AI, highlighting the fundamentally political nature of these technologies. In an effort to align the development, implementation, and scaling of AI to public values, scholars, policy-makers, and activists try to envision how these technologies can be democratized.