IGF 2024 WS #78 Intelligent machines and society: An open-ended conversation

    Organizer 1: Sorina Teleanu, DiploFoundation🔒
    Organizer 2: Jovan Kurbalija, 🔒
    Organizer 3: Andrijana Gavrilovic, 🔒

    Speaker 1: Sorina Teleanu, Civil Society, Eastern European Group
    Speaker 2: Jovan Kurbalija, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
    Speaker 3: Yung-Hsuan Wu, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

    Moderator

    Jovan Kurbalija, Civil Society, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)

    Online Moderator

    Andrijana Gavrilovic, Civil Society, Eastern European Group

    Rapporteur

    Andrijana Gavrilovic, Civil Society, Eastern European Group

    Format

    Roundtable
    Duration (minutes): 60
    Format description: Given that the nature of an open-ended conversation relies on maximising the degree of audience engagement, we proposed a session format that brings the audience, the speakers, and the moderators on the same level and encourages anyone to speak up. A less squarely structured setup of the room reduces the barriers and formality among participants; a more face-to-face environment is also conducive to multi-directional participation as everyone can be viewed. The length of the session is medium, allowing just enough time for participants to warm up and not too long for the conversation to lose its focus.

    Policy Question(s)

    In coming up with impact assessments of AI models, what are the additional dimensions we should consider apart from the more publicised human rights and ethics that are already in the public consciousness? How else can we ensure fairness, not just in the sense of fair representation of people of various characteristics, but also in respecting human competencies vis-a-vis machine automation? How can we operationalise a combination of human and non-human creativity that will be fed into future innovations in arts, technologies, and society? How do we steer such innovations to achieving sustainable development goals?

    What will participants gain from attending this session? By joining this session, participants will: Gain a basic understanding of various types of machine learning algorithms embedded in the social, political, and economic life of all of us. Acquire thinking tools and frameworks to assess the societal impacts of these various ‘intelligent’ agents. Actively contribute to a common sense-making exercises of the role of AI models mostly absent from policy consultation processes and learn from peer experiences. Experiment with and review AI tools, both commercial and Diplo-built under the speakers’ and moderators’ guidance.

    Description:

    Talks about AI have permeated the digital governance and policy space, from the principles and values with which we should steer AI development to which risks are the most urgent to mitigate. We talk a lot about challenges and opportunities and ways to ‘govern AI for humanity’; we tend to believe that new governance frameworks will be the solution we need to leverage AI for good, address the risks, and account for misuse and missed uses of the technology. But there are also broader, perhaps more philosophical questions about AI that we may want to spend a little more time on. For instance, how much time do we take to reflect on what it means to have intelligent machines functioning and working for or alongside us in our society? We’d like to invite you to an open-ended conversation filled with questions. Through collective sense-making, we wish to ground the talk about risks and opportunities that AI brings in human experiences. In this out-of-the-box workshop, we promise not solutions but a set of critical questions that prompt us to clarify the former. The following questions are a primer: Epistemological challenges in knowledge creation: Large Language Models (LLMs) as our new coworker? Analysts? Assistant? What roles do we imagine LLMs play vis-a-vis humans? Missing the forest for the trees: Are there other forms of intelligent machines/agents beyond LLMs we tend to talk so much about? If so, how much are they reflected/considered in our AI policy and governance discussions? Assigning human attributes to AI: What do we talk about when we talk about AI ‘understanding’, ‘reasoning’, etc.? When words lose their meaning: Five years from now, will we all sound like ChatGPT? How will human-machine co-generated language evolve, now depending less on contexts but on tokens associated with probabilities?

    Expected Outcomes

    This open-ended conversation is an attempt to encourage honest and humane reactions to the gradual integration of non-human agents in the society at large and discover the underlying values that humans commonly wish to protect or further reflect upon. Such an open sense-making exercise will help us get a firmer grasp on the society to come and potentially point to pathways that will lead to better outcomes/versions of this future society. Concretely, the unstructured yet thematised questions and responses coming from the audience will be transformed into a series of recommendations for further research to explore under-discussed areas of AI’s societal impacts, and proposals for more open-ended conversations to continue encouraging critical reflection and questioning spirits in eventual AI society.

    Hybrid Format: First and foremost, we invite IGF participants to join us for a somewhat different type of session - an open-ended conversation dependent on audience inputs. All participants will have a chance to speak, onsite and online; we will have two speakers/moderators onsite to guide the discussions. There will be no panellists with lecture-like presentations. The session will rely on Diplo’s experienced speakers/moderators who will – throughout the entire session – pay equal attention to onsite and online participants, ensuring that interventions from both audiences are treated equally. Online participants will be constantly encouraged to contribute their views, both by voice and by text chat. An additional experienced online moderator will engage with participants in the chat and ensure that the discussions happening there are integrated into the overall session. Moreover, we will use live discussion tools (e.g., Slido, Mentimeter, and Pigeonhole) to facilitate real-time exchanges between onsite and online participants.