Today I gave a short talk at a teach-in on the politics of data centres. The teach-in was part of the Stop Dirty Data Centres European Days of Action on 6 and 7 November, when local groups across Europe protested and called for a moratorium on large data centres.
The teach-in took place during a support demonstration organised by Fossielvrij NL at the Plimsollweg in Amsterdam Sloterdijk. That’s the site where Pure DC is building a hyperscale data centre for Microsoft, despite the city’s ban on hyperscales. Fieke Jansen and Charis Papaevangelou organised a line-up of Dutch university teachers, each of whom had five minutes, outdoors and without slides, to explain one part of what is at stake. Thanks to them for inviting me, to Fossielvrij NL for organising the demo and to Geef Tegengas for their direct action.
A rough abstract of what I said:
I don’t need to convince anyone at a demo like this that we should resist the buildout of big corporate AI. The question I asked was: what could computing be instead? I shared three lessons from my research as a designer. First, look past the app to the infrastructure underneath it. To really be able to shape applications, people need a say in the stuff they are built on top of. Second, you can leave an app, but you can’t leave the infrastructure, so pushing back takes durable organisations with members, in addition to individual protest. I used De Digitale Stad from back in 1994 as an early example of community computing. Third, in addition to opposing big corporate AI, I am mainly interested in exploring alternative forms of computing. Like the Luddites, we can reject exploitative technological practices without rejecting all technology. One test is whether a system resists extraction or accelerates it. This brings me to design. In my view design is always political, so designers should join communities and communities should become designers, both to resist extractive computing and to build regenerative computing that meets social needs.
Update 9 November 2026: Delta interviewed me about the teach-in. Read it in English or Dutch.
Speaking at the teach-in at the Plimsollweg, Amsterdam, 6 November 2026. Photo: Dorotea Pace / Fossielvrij NL.
Slides from my keynote at the CLICKNL Design Innovation Sessions, Digital Futures theme session, Dutch Design Week, 21 October 2026, Natlab, Eindhoven.
CLICKNL invited me to give this keynote. I saw it as a great opportunity to intervene in the debate about design and generative AI. My take is informed by my past work on contestability. That work is all about approaching “AI” as an arena where various parties compete over how it is made and how it is used. My take is also informed by my commitments to practice theory and political realism. Practice theory means looking at what people and things do together, rather than at technologies in isolation. Political realism means looking at politics as it actually happens. It asks who does what to whom, for whose benefit, instead of starting from abstract moral principles.
In the talk I argue that neither wholesale rejection nor uncritical embrace of generative AI will get us very far. GenAI deskills designers and opens up new ways of designing at the same time. It is built on the past work of designers, which raises the question of whose work we build on, and who gets to call the results their own. And it automates work, but in the process work may get delegated more than replaced, transforming practices as a result. Rather than trying to resolve these tensions, I look for emerging design practices that hold them and use them as an engine for moving forward. I discuss three cases: Vera van der Burg’s Text-to-Clay, Blaze Type’s test of Monotype’s AI type tool, and The Call by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. They all go beyond consuming off-the-shelf models. They treat pipelines and workflows as an object of design. And in all three there is an awareness of the value of effort and friction. I end with an open question. If AI is not one thing, not an agent, and neither our savior nor our doom, what metaphor does your mind go to?
I hope this talk helps designers think in concrete terms about how we might “do AI” differently from the dominant ways. And I hope it helps them break free from the simplistic for-or-against debates that get us nowhere.
Vera van der Burg, The Material Gaze: Reflective AI as a Design Practice, PhD dissertation, Delft University of Technology, 2026. https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:fb78a0d0-0eb9-46e9-b7af-d54bca8796ca (Text-to-Clay is Chapter 7, with technical details in Appendix D.)
Blaze Type and Monotype’s AI type tool
Sebastien Hayez, “Designing Fonts with AI: Future of Type Design”, Blaze Type Blog, 18 June 2025. https://blazetype.eu/blog/designing-fonts-with-ai/ (It reports Matthieu Salvaggio’s talk at Brand Talks, London, 12 June 2025.)
Victoria Ivanova and Jennifer Ding, Choral Data ‘Trust’ Experiment White Paper, Serpentine Arts Technologies, Zenodo, 17 Feb 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14859320
Jennifer Ding, Eva Jäger, Victoria Ivanova and Mercedes Bunz, “My Voice, Your Voice, Our Voice: Attitudes Towards Collective Governance of a Choral AI Dataset”, arXiv, 2 Dec 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.01433
CRTA visual identity, Bruketa&Žinić&Grey
Bruketa&Žinić&Grey, CRTA visual identity, for the Regional Centre of Excellence for Robotic Technology, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Zagreb, 2021.
Fieke Jansen, Sunjoo Lee, Kars Alfrink and Lena Trotereau, From Mud to Models: Regenerative Futures for Community AI (conference workshop), TH/NGS 2025, Amsterdam, 12 Dec 2025, and From Soil to Servers: Regenerative Futures for Community Computing (workshop), Creative Coding Utrecht, Utrecht, 27 Mar 2026; Kars Alfrink and Sunjoo Lee, with Advaita Jairam, From Soil to Servers: Pairing Material Practice with Speculative Design to Rethink Computing Infrastructure (conference workshop), Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference (PHTR 2026), The Hague, 22 Sep 2026.
Kars Alfrink, Sunjoo Lee, Lena Trotereau and Fieke Jansen, “Mud and models: Does making matter for regenerative AI speculation?”, in Iskander Smit and Andrea Krajewski (eds.), The State of Responsible Technology – RESIZE<REMIX<REGEN (RIOT 2026), Stichting ThingsCon Amsterdam, June 2026, pp. 34–39. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20569440
Further reading
Alfrink, K. (2025). People’s compute: Design and the politics of AI infrastructures. OSF. https://doi.org/10/q8kp
Caplan, L. (2025). Introduction: Contesting models – art and democracy since the 1990s. In L. Caplan & K. Greaves (Eds.), Model collapse: European contemporary art in a time of democratic crisis (pp. 1–20). Manchester University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.36233585.6
Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and real politics. Princeton University Press.
Kuutti, K., & Bannon, L. J. (2014). The turn to practice in HCI: Towards a research agenda. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3543–3552). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557111
Löwgren, J., & Stolterman, E. (2004). Thoughtful interaction design: A design perspective on information technology. MIT Press.
McGowan, T. (2016). Capitalism and desire: The psychic cost of free markets. Columbia University Press.
McGowan, T. (2019). Emancipation after Hegel: Achieving a contradictory revolution. Columbia University Press.
Parsons, P. C. (2026). Myths and ironies of AI-assisted design. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26) (pp. 523–535). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813086
Porfirio, D., McDermott, I., Chen, H.-M., Satake, S., Kanda, T., & LaToza, T. D. (2026). Designing for robot wranglers: A synthesis of literature and practice. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’26) (pp. 4284–4298). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813070
Retkowsky, J., Hafermalz, E., & Huysman, M. (2026). Harnessing a “spirited technology”: How working with generative AI collapses the creative process. Academy of Management Discoveries, 12(3), 363–387. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2024.0280
Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Gal, Y., Papernot, N., & Anderson, R. (2024). The curse of recursion: Training on generated data makes models forget. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493
This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.
About the original
The original ran to about 296 words, with 3 references.
Abstract
Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.
A short post on the author’s distance from online AI discourse. Drawing on Lee Vinsel’s notion of hype and criti-hype and Jodi Dean’s “communicative capitalism”, it argues that online debate is not a public sphere: platforms profit from the circulation of opinions, and that circulation substitutes for political action. For someone working on AI politics the conclusion is practical rather than principled: building power happens through organising and institutions, not in threads.
This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.
About the original
Based on an invited talk delivered at Enterprise UX, on November 21, 2025 in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. The original ran to about 1,269 words and 16 images.
Abstract
Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.
The post asks what to question before adding an LLM feature to a work tool: whether it actually works, who gains or loses power, and which practices and skills it transforms. It frames these as questions of worker autonomy (authenticity and agency, after Prunkl), illustrated with scenes from Office Space, and lists ways AI threatens autonomy: manipulation, restricted choice, diminished competence. It then sketches a toolkit for designing AI for autonomy and applies three of its elements (reflexive design, stakeholder negotiation, collective autonomy support) to LegalMike, a Dutch legal AI platform, concluding that designers act as brokers of autonomy.
I am over one year into my postdoc at TU Delft. Where did the time go? By way of an annual report, here’s a rundown of my most notable outputs and activities since the previous update from June 2024. And also, some notes on what I am up to now.
Happenings
Participatory AI and ML Engineering: On 13 February 2024 at a Human Values for Smarter Cities meeting and on 11 June 2024 at a Cities Coalition for Digital Rights meeting, I presented a talk on participatory AI and ML engineering (blogged here). This has since evolved into a study I am currently running with the working title “Vision Model Macroscope.” We are designing, building, and evaluating an interface that allows municipal workers to understand and debate value-laden technical decisions made by machine learning engineers in the construction of camera vehicles. For the design, I am collaborating with CLEVER°FRANKE. The study is part of the Human Values for Smarter Cities projected headed up by the Civic Interaction Design group at AUAS.
Envisioning Contestability Loops: My article “Envisioning Contestability Loops: Evaluating the Agonistic Arena as a Generative Metaphor for Public AI” (with Ianus Keller, Mireia Yurrita Semperena, Denis Bulygin, Gerd Kortuem, and Neelke Doorn) was published in She Ji on 17 June 2024. (I had already published the infographic “Contestability Loops for Public AI,” which the article revolves around, on 17 April 2024.) Later in the year, on 5 September 2024, I ran the workshop that the study builds on as a ThingsCon Salon. And on 27 September 2024, I presented the article at Lawtomation Days in Madrid, Spain, as part of the panel “Methods in law and technology research: inter- and cross-disciplinary challenges and opportunities,” chaired by Kostina Prifti (slides). (Also, John Thackara said nice things about the article online.)
Contestability Loops for Public AI infographic
Envisioning Contestability Loops workshop at ThingsCon Salon in progress.
Democratizing AI Through Continuous Adaptability: I presented on “Democratizing AI Through Continuous Adaptability: The Role of DevOps” at the TILTing Perspectives 2024 panel “The mutual shaping of democratic practices & AI,” which was chaired and moderated by Merel Noorman on 14 July 2024. I later reprised this talk at NWO ICT.OPEN on 16 April 2025 as part of the track “Human-Computer Interaction and Societal Impact in the Netherlands,” chaired by Armağan Karahanoğlu and Max Birk (PDF of slides).
From Stem to Stern: I was part of the organizing team of the CSCW 2024 workshop “From Stem to Stern: Contestability Along AI Value Chains,” which took place as a hybrid one-day session on 9 November 2024. I blogged a summary and some takeaways of the workshop here. Shoutout to Agathe Balayn and Yulu Pi for leading this endeavor.
Designing Responsible AI: Over the course of 2024, Sara Colombo, Francesca Mauri, and I developed and taught for the first time a new Integrated Product Design master’s elective, “Designing Responsible AI” (course description). Later, on 28 March 2025, I was invited by my colleagues Alessandro Bozzon and Carlo van der Valk to give a single-morning interactive lecture on part of the same content at the course AI Products and Services (slides).
Books that represent the range of theory covered in the course “Designing Responsible AI.”
Stop the Cuts: On 2 July 2024, a far-right government was sworn in in the Netherlands (it has since fallen). They intended to cut funding to education by €2 billion. A coalition of researchers, teachers, students, and others organized to protest and strike in response. I was present at several of these actions: The alternative opening of the academic year in Utrecht on 2 September 2024. Local walkouts on 14 November 2024 (I participated in Utrecht). Mass demonstration in The Hague on 25 November 2024. Local actions on 11 December 2024 (I participated in Delft). And finally, for now at least, on 24 April 2025, at the Delft edition of the nationwide relay strike. If you read this, work in academia, and want to act, join a union (I am a member of the AOb), and sign up for the WOinActie newsletter.
End of the march during the 24 April 2025 strike in Delft.
Panels: Over the past months, I was a panelist at several events. On 22 October 2024, at the Design & AI Symposium as part of the panel “Evolving Perspectives on AI and Design,” together with Iohanna Nicenboim and Jesse Benjamin, moderated by Mathias Funk (blog post). On 13 December 2024 at TH/NGS as part of the panel “Rethink Design: Book Launch and Panel Discussion on Designing With AI” chaired by Roy Bendor (video). On 12 March 2025, at the panel “Inclusive AI: Approaches to Digital Inclusion,” chaired by Nazli Cila and Taylor Stone.
Slide I used during my panel contribution at the Design & AI symposium.
Design for Human Autonomy: I was part of several activities organized by the Delft Design for Values institute related to their annual theme of autonomy (led by Michael Klenk). I was a panelist on 15 October 2024 during the kick-off event (blog post). I wrote the section on designing AI for autonomy for the white paper edited by Udo Pesch (preprint). And during the closing symposium, master’s graduation student Ameya Sawant, whom I am coaching (with Fernando Secomandi acting as chair), was honored as a finalist in the thesis competition.
Master Graduation Students: Four master students that I coached during their thesis projects graduated, which between them explored technology’s role in society through AI-mediated civic engagement, generative AI implementation in public services, experimental approaches to AI trustworthiness, and urban environmental sensing—Nina te Groen (with Achilleas Psyilidis as chair), Romée Postma (with Roy Bendor), Eline Oei (with Giulia Calabretta), and Jim Blom (with Tomasz Jaskiewicz).
Architecting for Contestability: On 22 November 2025, I ran a single-day workshop about contestability for government-employed ICT architects participating in the Digital Design & Architecture course offered by the University of Twente, on invitation from Marijn Janssen (slides).
Qualitative Design Research: On 17 December 2024, I delivered a lecture on qualitative design research for the course Empirical Design Research, on invitation from my colleague Himanshu Verma (slides). Later, on 22 April 2025, I delivered a follow-up in the form of a lecture on reflexive thematic analysis for the course Product Futures Studio, coordinated by Holly McQuillan (slides).
Democratic Generative Things: On 6 June 2025 I joined the ThingsCon unconference to discuss my contribution to the RIOT report, “Embodied AI and collective power: Designing democratic generative things” (preprint). The report was edited by edited by Andrea Krajewski and Iskander Smit.
Me, holding forth during the ThingsCon RIOT unconference.
Learning Experience Design: I delivered the closing invited talk at LXDCON on 12 June 2025, reflecting on the impact of GenAI on the fields of education and design for learning (slides). Many thanks to Niels Floor for the invitation.
People’s Compute: I published a preprint of my position paper “People’s Compute: Design and the Politics of AI Infrastructures” over at OSF on 14 April 2025. I emailed it to peers and received over a dozen encouraging responses. It was also somehow picked up by Evgeny Morozov’s The Syllabus with some nice commentary attached.
On deck
So what am I up to at the moment? Keeping nice and busy.
I am co-authoring several articles, papers, and book chapters on topics including workplace automation, AI transparency, contestability in engineering, AI design and regulation, computational argumentation, explainable and participatory AI, and AI infrastructure politics. I do hope at least some of these will see the light of day in the coming months.
I am preparing a personal grant application that builds on the vision laid out in People’s Compute.
I will be delivering an invited talk at Enterprise UX on 21 November 2025.
I am acting as a scientific advisor to a center that is currently being established, which focuses on increasing digital autonomy within Dutch government institutions.
I will be co-teaching Designing Responsible AI again in Q1 of the next academic year.
I’ll serve as an associate chair on the CHI 2026 design subcommittee.
And I have signed up to begin our university’s teaching qualification certification.
Whew. That’s it. Thanks for reading (skimming?) if you’ve made it all the way to the end. I will try to circle back and do another update, maybe a little sooner than this one, say in six months’ time.
This post was taken down on 26 October 2026. A revised version will appear at this address.
About the original
Report on a workshop held at CSCW 2024 (November 2024). The original ran to about 761 words and 1 image.
Abstract
Generated by Claude, a language model, from the original text; not written by the author.
The workshop, “From Stem to Stern: Contestability Along AI Value Chains”, looked at contesting AI not only at the point of individual decisions but across the whole chain, from resource extraction to deployment. The post shares the AI value chain mapping canvas (CC-BY, Yurrita & Alfrink) used in the first group activity, explains how the 50-minute mapping exercise with ChatGPT as the example case was run, and names its influences (value chain mapping, Wardley mapping). Takeaways include the vocabulary gap between legal and technical communities, the need to move from individual grievance to collective and upstream contestation, and the importance of Global South perspectives. It credits the full workshop team.
Thijs Kleinpaste heeft een mooie boekbespreking van Michael Young’s De opkomst van de meritocratie in de Nederlandse Boekengids. Een paar passages die ik vooral sterk vond hieronder.
De grote verdienste van Young is dat hij inzichtelijk maakt hoe onschuldige principes als ‘beloning naar verdienste’ volkomen kunnen ontsporen als ze worden ingezet binnen een verder onveranderd sociaal en economisch stelsel. Concreet: sommigen een uitverkoren positie geven in een maatschappelijke hiërarchie en anderen opdragen om hun plek te kennen.
Het klassenbelang van de meritocratie is abstracter. Het belangrijkste is om allereerst een klasse of kaste te blijven om zo de voordelen daarvan te kunnen blijven oogsten. In iedere moderne staat wordt macht uitgeoefend – of meritocratischer gezegd: moet er bestuurd worden – en als er dan toch een kaste moet zijn die deze taak vervult, laat dat die van de hoogst gediplomeerden zijn. De meritocratie reproduceert zichzelf door deze gedachte mee te geven aan elke nieuwe lichting die tot haar uitverkoren rangen toetreedt: dat zij de juiste, met recht geroepen groep is om de wereld te ordenen. Niet de arbeidersklasse, niet de ongeleide democratie, niet het gekrioel van belangengroepjes – maar zij. Alle materiële voordelen van de meritocratie vloeien voort uit het in stand houden van die uitverkoren status.
Te vaak lijkt de gedachte te zijn dat vertegenwoordiging en het bedienen van belangen onproblematisch in elkaars verlengde liggen. Om die zelfgenoegzaamheid te doorbreken is kennelijk iets stelligers nodig, zoals de gedachte dat waar managers en bestuurders zijn, er gestaakt moet kunnen worden: dat waar macht wordt uitgeoefend en waar aanwijzingen worden gegeven, zij die de aanwijzingen moeten opvolgen kunnen stemmen met hun voeten. Dat conflict omarmd wordt en niet wordt gezien als iets wat gevaarlijk is voor de maatschappelijke lieve vrede, de ‘economie’, of zelfs de democratie. Conflict is ongetwijfeld gevaarlijk voor de hegemonie van de manager en diens klasse van droomkoninkjes, en daarmee voor de soevereiniteit van de meritocratische orde, maar dat gevaar is zowel heilzaam als noodzakelijk. Een van de lessen van het boek van Young is immers ook dat je moet kiezen: zelf een revolutie maken, of wachten tot die uitbreekt.
This is not exactly a now page, but I thought I would write up what I am doing at the moment since last reporting on my status in my end-of-year report.
The majority of my workdays are spent doing freelance design consulting. My primary gig has been through Eend at the Dutch Victim Support Foundation, where until very recently I was part of a team building online services. I helped out with product strategy, setting up a lean UX design process, and getting an integrated agile design and development team up and running. The first services are now shipping so it is time for me to move on, after 10 months of very gratifying work. I really enjoy working in the public sector and I hope to be doing more of it in future.
So yes, this means I am available and you can hire me to do strategy and design for software products and services. Just send me an email.
Shortly before the Dutch national elections of this year, Iskander and I gathered a group of fellow tech workers under the banner of “Tech Solidarity NL” to discuss the concerning lurch to the right in national politics and what our field can do about it. This has developed into a small but active community who gather monthly to educate ourselves and develop plans for collective action. I am getting a huge boost out of this. Figuring out how to be a leftist in this day and age is not easy. The only way to do it is to practice and for that reflection with peers is invaluable. Building and facilitating a group like this is hugely educational too. I have learned a lot about how a community is boot-strapped and nurtured.
And finally, the last major thing on my plate is a continuing effort to secure a PhD position for myself. I am getting great support from people at Delft University of Technology, in particular Gerd Kortuem. I am focusing on internet of things products that have features driven by machine learning. My ultimate aim is to develop prototyping tools for design and development teams that will help them create more innovative and more ethical solutions. The first step for this will be to conduct field research inside companies who are creating such products right now. So I am reaching out to people to see if I can secure a reasonable amount of potential collaborators for this, which will go a long way in proving the feasibility of my whole plan.
If you know of any companies that develop consumer-facing products that have a connected hardware component and make use of machine learning to drive features, do let me know.
That’s about it. Freelance UX consulting, leftist tech-worker organising and design-for-machine-learning research. Quite happy with that mix, really.
A few weeks ago I facilitated a discussion on ‘advocacy in a post-truth era’ at the European Digital Rights Initiative’s annual general assembly. And last night I was part of a discussion on fake news at a behaviour design meetup in Amsterdam. This was a good occasion to pull together some of my notes and figure out what I think is true about the ‘fake news’ phenomenon.
There is plenty of good writing out there exploring the history and current state of post-truth political culture.
Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” and Michael Gove’s “I think people have had enough of experts” are just two examples of the right’s appropriation of what I would call epistemological relativism. Post-modernism was fun while it worked to advance our leftist agenda. But now that the tables are turned we’re not enjoying it quite as much anymore, are we?
Part of the fact-free politics playbook goes back at least as far as big tobacco’s efforts to discredit the anti-smoking lobby. “Doubt is our product” still applies to modern day reactionary movements such as climate change deniers and anti-vaxers.
The double whammy of news industry commercialisation and internet platform consolidation has created fertile ground for coordinated efforts by various groups to turn the sowing of doubt all the way up to eleven.
There is Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” which sends a high volume of messages across a wide range of channels with total disregard for truth or even consistency in a rapid, continuous and repetitive fashion. They seem to be having fun destabilising western democracies — including the Netherlands — without any apparent end-goal in mind.
And then there is the outrage marketing leveraged by trolls both minor and major. Pissing off mainstream media builds an audience on the fringes and in the underground. Journalists are held hostage by figures such as Milo because they depend on stories that trigger strong emotions for distribution, eyeballs, clicks and ultimately revenue.
So, given all of this, what is to be done? First some bad news. Facts, the weapon of choice for liberals, don’t appear to work. This is empirically evident from recent events, but it also appears to be borne out by psychology.
Facts are often more complicated than the untruths they are supposed to counter. It is also easier to remember a simple lie than a complicated truth. Complicating matters further, facts tend to be boring. Finally, and most interestingly, there is something called the ‘backfire effect’: we become more entrenched in our views when confronted with contradicting facts, because they are threatening to our group identities.
More bad news. Given the speed at which falsehoods spread through our networks, fact-checking is useless. Fact-checking is after-the-fact-checking. Worse, when media fact-check falsehoods on their front pages they are simply providing even more airtime to them. From a strategic perspective, when you debunk, you allow yourself to be captured by your opponent’s frame, and you’re also on the defensive. In Boydian terms you are caught in their OODA loop, when you should be working to take back the initiative, and you should be offering an alternative narrative.
I am not hopeful mainstream media will save us from these dynamics given the realities of the business models they operate inside of. Journalists inside of these organisations are typically overworked, just holding on for dear life and churning out stories at a rapid clip. In short, there is no time to orient and manoeuvre. For bad-faith actors, they are sitting ducks.
What about literacy? If only people knew about churnalism, the attention economy, and filter bubbles ‘they’ would become immune to the lies peddled by reactionaries and return to the liberal fold. Personally I find these claims highly unconvincing not to mention condescending.
My current working theory is that we, all of us, buy into the stories that activate one or more of our group identities, regardless of wether they are fact-based or outright lies. This is called ‘motivated reasoning’. Since this is a fact of psychology, we are all susceptible to it, including liberals who are supposedly defenders of fact-based reasoning.
Seriously though, what about literacy? I’m sorry, no. There is evidence that scientific literacy actually increases polarisation. Motivated reasoning trumps factual knowledge you may have. The same research shows however that curiosity in turn trumps motivated reasoning. The way I understand the distinction between literacy and curiosity is that the former is about knowledge while the latter is about attitude. Motivated reasoning isn’t counteracted by knowing stuff, but by wanting to know stuff.
This is a mixed bag. Offering facts is comparatively easy. Sparking curiosity requires storytelling which in turn requires imagination. If we’re presented with a fact we are not invited to ask questions. However, if we are presented with questions and those questions are wrapped up in stories that create emotional stakes, some of the views we hold might be destabilised.
In other words, if doubt is the product peddled by our opponents, then we should start trafficking in curiosity.
Some notes on artificial intelligence, technology as partner and related user interface design challenges. Mostly notes to self, not sure I am adding much to the debate. Just summarising what I think is important to think about more. Warning: Dense with links.
I’m personally much more interested in machine intelligence as human augmentation rather than the oft-hyped AI assistant as a separate embodiment.
I would add a third possibility, which is AI as master. A common fear we humans have and one I think only growing as things like AlphaGo and new Boston Dynamics robots keep happening.
“technology is not a servant or a master but a source of expression, a way of being”
So this idea actually does not just apply to AI but to tech in general. Of course, as tech gets smarter and more independent from humans, the idea of a ‘third way’ only grows in importance.
More tweeting. A while back, shortly after AlphaGo’s victory, James tweeted:
Advanced Chess is a clear example of humans and AI partnering. And it is also an example of technology as a source of expression and a way of being.
Also, in a WIRED article on AlphaGo, someone who had played the AI repeatedly says his game has improved tremendously.
So that is the promise: Artificially intelligent systems which work together with humans for mutual benefit.
Now of course these AIs don’t just arrive into the world fully formed. They are created by humans with particular goals in mind. So there is a design component there. We can design them to be partners but we can also design them to be masters or slaves.
As an aside: Maybe AIs that make use of deep learning are particularly well suited to this partner model? I do not know enough about it to say for sure. But I was struck by this piece on why Google ditched Boston Dynamics. There apparently is a significant difference between holistic and reductionist approaches, deep learning being holistic. I imagine reductionist AI might be more dependent on humans. But this is just wild speculation. I don’t know if there is anything there.
This insistence of James on “advanced everything else” is a world view. A politics. To allow ourselves to be increasingly entangled with these systems, to not be afraid of them. Because if we are afraid, we either want to subjugate them or they will subjugate us. It is also about not obscuring the systems we are part of. This is a sentiment also expressed by James in the same series of tweets I quoted from earlier:
These emergences are also the best model we have ever built for describing the true state of the world as it always already exists.
[W]e are no longer just using computers. We are using computers to use the world. The obscured and complex code and engineering now engages with people, resources, civics, communities and ecosystems. Should designers continue to privilege users above all others in the system? What would it mean to design for participants instead? For all the participants?
AI partners might help us to better see the systems the world is made up of and engage with them more deeply. This hope is expressed by Matt Webb, too:
with the re-emergence of artificial intelligence (only this time with a buddy-style user interface that actually works), this question of “doing something for me” vs “allowing me to do even more” is going to get even more pronounced. Both are effective, but the first sucks… or at least, it sucks according to my own personal politics, because I regard individual alienation from society and complex systems as one of the huge threats in the 21st century.
I am reminded of the mixed-initiative systems being researched in the area of procedural content generation for games. I wrote about these a while back on the Hubbub blog. Such systems are partners of designers. They give something like super powers. Now imagine such powers applied to other problems. Quite exciting.
Actually, in the aforementioned article I distinguish between tools for making things and tools for inspecting possibility spaces. In the first case designers manipulate more abstract representations of the intended outcome and the system generates the actual output. In the second case the system visualises the range of possible outcomes given a particular configuration of the abstract representation. These two are best paired.
From a design perspective, a lot remains to be figured out. If I look at those mixed-initiative tools I am struck by how poorly they communicate what the AI is doing and what its capabilities are. There is a huge user interface design challenge there.
For stuff focused on getting information, a conversational UI seems to be the current local optimum for working with an AI. But for tools for creativity, to use the two-way split proposed by Victor, different UIs will be required.
What shape will they take? What visual language do we need to express the particular properties of artificial intelligence? What approaches can we take in addition to personifying AI as bots or characters? I don’t know and I can hardly think of any good examples that point towards promising approaches. Lots to be done.
