I’ve not really managed a weeknotes practice for a few months, but after quite the week I’ll try and stick to sharing the last few days - and catch up on other reflections later.
At the United Nations
The big news of the week is that I’ve been in the Big Apple sharing the fruits of a four-month long extended design-lab on Options for a Global Citizens Assembly on AI.
After attending the Science Summit sessions discussing the newly released ‘Governing AI for Humanity’ report on Thursday, on Friday I shared our new paper: Global Citizen Deliberation on Artificial Intelligence: Options and design considerations at a discussion event hosted by Tech Salon New York (write up coming soon), and in the afternoon we joined Missions Publique and James Fishkin of the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab to discuss their developing proposals for a global deliberative poll and distributed dialogue with 10,000 people worldwide to address questions on AI.
On Saturday, I had the honour of heading inside UN HQ for the second of two Summit of the Future Action Days. I found it, if I am honest, a quite overwhelming and emotional day. From starting the day in the General Assembly Chamber with speeches from the Secretary General framing two key challenges of “Climate Chaos and Unregulated Technologies”, from young leaders on their demand for a seat at the table, and astronauts on both the international and Chinese space stations reflecting on global cooperation and our fragile planet - through to sitting alongside civil society activists and advocates from across the globe all working to navigate tough international headwinds, but to address issues with commitment and solidarity.
As young leaders presented their compelling call to not just be consulted, but to have a seat at the table as co-producers of a common future, I reflected on my own first encounter with the UN over 20 years ago as a 17 year old member of the then Labour Government’s Children and Young People’s Unit Advisory Board: invited to be part of the UK delegation to the UK’s quintennial review by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. I recall our similar calls, and our impatience for action - an impatience that young people today have even more right to express, and I feel both anger at the lack of progress, and reflect on what more I should do to respond. I also reflect on the parallels between paternalistic and tokenistic rejection of a meaningful say for young people, with the exclusion of affected communities from technology governance: where seniority and narrow technical or policy expertise are used to gatekeep spaces that should be shared with those who bring lived experience too.
I know many people are sceptical about global governance and the UN system and it of course has many flaws, not least with respect to AI governance the extent of corporate capture on show over this week. Yet, it is a forum bringing together the globe - and without requiring all problems to be solved globally, global conversations are absolutely essential if we are to find ways of securing a future for our planet.
I was particularly moved by the closing remarks of the action day from Barbados PM Mia Mottley, and sending a video message home to my kids was in tears, both hopeful and deeply worried for our world.
The need for narratives
There was so much interesting debate in our Friday Tech Salon discussion that I won’t try and capture it all here (and the Tech Salon team are working on a write-up too), but there is one theme that’s come up for me in both our roundtable, and virtually all the other AI discussions I’ve been to. It’s a theme that also emerged in our retrospective on Monday of The Governance Game - and that’s the challenge people have in picturing AI benefits and impacts from outside their own experience - or different levels of the AI governance stack from those they work on.
So often this week, discussions that should ultimately centre impacts on marginalised communities, or the majority world experience, get drawn back to a narrow set of experiences and issues about generative AI or #FirstWorldProblems, or get framed solely in terms of model training, or frontier AI moratoria.
Of course, in part this is exactly why global deliberation is needed: to surface different voices and perspectives - and to bring a wider range of policy options and levels of intervention onto the table. But I get the feeling that it’s a hard-sell to many people because they are only seeing a very small part of the elephant: and as a result, can only ‘see’ a small range of the people who should be really be round the table (if you will forgive my mixed metaphors).
The phrase I’ve written down for myself a good few times this week is the GDS classic: “Show, don’t tell“, and I’m reflecting on what that could look like. Perhaps the next iteration of the Governance Game as a resource could include more short stories to illustrate the kinds of impacts data and AI have. Both Global Voices Civic Media Observatory, and the AI Risk Database could be useful to draw upon for this.
Coalitions and movements
My other big take-away from the Summit of the Future action days was the importance of movement and coalition building. The issues that have made it onto the global agenda do so because they have strong coalitions of backing: often including both civil society and member states.
The data and AI governance field remains poorly developed in this regard: and AI governance coalition-building is made trickier both by the lack of shared narratives and a lack of common ground right now between X-risk and present-harm focussed communities.
Walking New York: commons, enclosure, displacement
I spent most of today explore New York by foot and ferry: talking first from my hotel near Grand Central station, to 15th Street Meeting and then exploring Stuy Town and heading up the river to walk through Central Park. On the way, I passed a Robert Moses Recreation Ground, and strolled under FDR Drive, as well as stumbling across Gramercey Park. Since I’ve recently been both listening to the 99% Invisible breakdown of the power broker which describes Robert Moses’ impact on the architecture of New York, and reading Hoskin and Stamps 1962 history of English & Welsh Common Lands that looks at the complex history of commons (Gramercey Park is held in common) and after a couple of discussions of commons at Summit of the Future yesterday, I was in, I think it’s fair to say, in nerd heaven. Add to that some of the information boards in Central Park detailing the original land ownership of the area, and, well.
I mainly write this as a warning that if you ask me about either New York itself, or Commons, in the coming weeks, the is a risk I’ll expound at length on the above.
But, it has also been instructive to reflect in parallel on the deeply textured local histories of enclosure, commonning and appropriation present across rural and urban histories both sides of the Atlantic, and current debates about ‘digital commons’ and ‘our common future’.
Other things
- It was great on Friday to meet Kiito in person for the first time, see Hera from our board, and reconnect with Astha and the Aapti team, as well as to meet with Lina, our fantastic Tech Salon moderator - and author of this super Stanford Social Innovation Review piece on Building Community Governance for AI.
- With this week in New York, I’ve been trying to get back into social media posting (perhaps for this week only!) but you will find some of my other takes from the week on BlueSky, Mastodon and LinkedIn
- I joined a fascintating workshop run by Atlas Movement this afternoon exploring potential policy asks for global AI governance. Looking forward to seeing there that work develops.
- I’m around in the US until next Friday - in DC Tuesday and Wednesday and back to New York on Thursday to celebrate 10 years of Data & Society Institute. If you are in (either) town and want to catch-up, do drop me a line.