This post is an overview of the direction of #NewMacy Conversations as of August, 2021. Click here to read #NewMacy documentation, including more recent activities .
The need for #NewMacy Meetings arose at the start of COVID-19. Overpowering realizations about global systemic challenges, beyond the current biological pandemic, demanded response. Design began with a broad community of colleagues through conversation and critique. A comprehensive manifesto emerged, followed by a focused and justifiable path for responding to the pandemic of “Today’s AI”. Most recently a conference keynote has captured the rationale and overall plan.
Why “Today’s AI” as a phrase? Not all AI is negative—yet so much of the artificial intelligence inside of today’s tech is manipulating what we see and distorting the world we share. Fueled by massive increases in “big data” and compute power, the machine-learning algorithms behind “Today’s AI” are tirelessly fomenting polarization, spreading social bias, pushing irrelevant products, co-opting our attention, addicting us to harmful activities, and surveilling our lives. A single, unregulated, global social-media platform, implicated in that litany of harm, has 2.8 billion active users. The Internet and its ubiquitous digital devices touch over 4.5 billion people. Surely “Today’s AI” is a pandemic of technology at global scale.
Technology itself is not at fault. How we fashion it, the values we embed in it, and the motivations that promote it are at fault, serving the ends of companies that compromise the social fabric of our lives.
“Today’s AI” is not the only option we have to live with. We can shift technology toward our analog roots—our physical, organic, biological, and social selves. We can design and propagate a set of humane interactional frameworks as counter-examples to the dominant platforms of social media and sharing, search and recommendations. For a start.
We can deliberately decide what we wish to conserve to remain human—and then build technologies that serve our principles. By bringing forth replacements for the algorithms of “Today’s AI” we can begin to have a positive effect. Novelty and choice, transparency and conversation can become new core principles for our online lives.
We can start by thinking cybernetically—not in the constricted sense of robotics, AI, cyborgs, or cyberspace, but in its original meaning as a discipline for understanding systems that have purpose. The concepts of Cybernetics bring an ethical imperative to human action and offer a “bilingual sensibility” that can bridge the analog of our biology and the digital of our devices (see graphic at top). But it is only one place to start.
Our plan is to design and integrate new classes of interactive systems with today’s AI and digital technologies. Our goal is to create and promote new design patterns and working prototypes that bring positive change.
Urgency of the need and scale of the challenge require that we convene #NewMacy Conversations in a Network of #NewMacy Meetings. (Read about the original Macy Meetings here.) We must bring together voices across all disciplines, geographies, and generations. Let us bring about a rich mesh of collaborations among individuals and organizations.
Please join us. We will convene #NewMacy Meeting #2 on Sunday September 19, 2021 at 12.00 EDT as part of the Speaker Series of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). Click here to register for the event and to receive instructions for proposing an “urgent question” that you wish to have discussed at the meeting.
Write to paul.pangaro@asc-cybernetics.org if you wish to be added to the #NewMacy mailing list. Details before and after the event will also be shared here.
If not us, then who?
Diagrams are after Dubberly, Evenson, and Robinson 2008