Town Hall 2020: Should an AI run your council services?

[mozfest-bot]

[ ID ] 9fde6236-e874-42a0-aa2a-258e5f02e88d

[ Submitter's Name ] Lydia Nicholas [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Nesta [ Submitter's Twitter ] @lydnicholas

[ Space ] cities [ Secondary Space ] science

[ Format ] fireside, hands-on, An hour of discussion and then semi-fictionalised "town hall" debate set in the future

Description

Artificial intelligence offers new efficiencies & opportunities for local services; as banal as routes for collecting bins, as critical as where to build fire stations, as fraught as predicting crime and child abuse. These debates involve deep ethical quandaries and entrenched discrimination, squeamishness about robot overlords, and problems in our population's data literacy, with lives, families and the safety and basic functions of our homes at stake. People are already deciding whether to allow these AI services into their communities in real-life debates in the US and New Zealand and they're on their way to the UK. Join us and a panel of experts to debate real and near-future AI services coming to a town near you.

Agenda

We'll have 4 faciliators/speakers; each will run a table of attendees who will be split and assigned 'positive' or 'negative' view points, who will then debate a series of questions for 20 minutes, which should be time to build participant confidence, share facts about real life services, set up some good questions to begin the main debate with. After that the facilitators will move to a stage and present as experts/local leaders in a fake English town, and the audience will play the community, we'll debate for 40 minutes, and then vote on which services will be allowed.

Participants

if it's 0-10, we'll run the first half for nearer 30 minutes, and for the future discussion and debate section we'll act as if it's a smaller meeting of councillors and community representatives. We will draft simple fictional personas for attendees if they want to use those that rather than give details of their personal life & views (i.e. "you run the local power plant and have a school-age child with a mild learning disability" and offer to assign them negative or positive feelings about AI though not force it). low attendance isn't an uncommon problem in town hall debates!

11-25 will be big tables with good levels of debate, and the town hall session will be more like an audience Q&A; not everyone will get to ask a question of the panel, but they will all have contributed to some of the questions drafted at tables

Outcome

Many real world AI town halls have fallen apart rather spectacularly and publically, with investment lost and misunderstandings abounding; it will be useful for us to get more of an understanding of how these debates can work, and we plan to refine this model over time, and potentially feed in to real world debates. We hope attendees will learn about the nuances of AI ethics; moving from squeamishness and misconceptions about robot governance to thinking in terms of grey areas, and that perception and debate would spread through their communities. We also hope they would understand more about the real practical capabilities of AI in local services right now, and the potential pitfalls. We may ask attendees to write us a few words which we will compile into a blog about the event.

[thornet]

tentative fit for the kitchen, home or garden zone

[cubicgarden]

I'd like to offer it to Open Science, but if not we will have it in our Home space for sure

[edrushka]

@Saallen this session in 2 pathways. I suggest we keep in AR/VR.