Speaking of the future: the art of strategic conversation
In this post, Matthew Finch, Malka Older, Carissa Véliz, and Annina Lux reflect on their article ‘The Art of Strategic Conversation: Surveillance, AI, and the IMAJINE Scenarios’, which appeared in the 21(3) issue of Surveillance & Society.
How can we use events which haven’t happened yet to help us understand surveillance and society? Our present day is swarming with futures. They include everything from weather reports and sci-fi movies to economic forecasts, year-end predictions, and five (or fifty!) year plans. Such visions can be persuasive, influencing us towards actually creating the world we will inhabit. In our recent article “The Art of Strategic Conversation”, for Surveillance & Society’s special issue on AI & Surveillance, we seek to test how critical explorations of the future might usefully inform discussion and debate around the role of artificial intelligence in surveillance.
Artificial intelligence is a relatively novel technology. Beyond the current hype, there is deep uncertainty about what aspects of our lives will prove susceptible to automation in times to come. Will we see AI therapists, lawyers, plumbers? Will fundamental concepts like trust and learning need to evolve if nonhuman actors, as well as human ones, must trust one another, or learn for themselves? Will definitions of legal personhood and responsibility change as AIs act independently, or begin to collaborate with humans in new, hybrid ways?
In addition to uncertainties around the future capacity of AI, we also don’t yet know how the technology might be deployed, perceived, governed, and resisted by various communities around the world. Surveillance lies at the intersection of many social, technological, and political forces. When these meet artificial intelligence, additional complications may ensue.
Some foresight experts describe situations like these as “TUNA conditions”, characterised by Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty, and Ambiguity. Under such circumstances, we can’t be sure what tomorrow will hold based on models and expectations drawn from the past. Instead, we may construct future scenarios to consider how issues might play out.
For Surveillance & Society, we drew on the IMAJINE scenario set, developed to explore the future of regional inequality across Europe. Each of IMAJINE’s four worlds shows technology, governance, and social values developing in challenging and contrasting ways. These futures offer a new perspective on what might be considered just or fair treatment of society’s “haves” and “have nots” in times to come. This makes them ideal platforms for us to manufacture hindsight, looking back on the challenges of the here and now.
Beginning with contemporary concerns about the connection between AI and surveillance, we explored how the two topics could relate in each future. We contemplated a “Robin Hood AI” that took from the rich to give to the poor, but might be operating from a warped notion of fairness. We imagined emotionally literate AI using surveillance and shame to manipulate human behaviour. And we considered how “AI”, like “bureaucracy”, could also be a smokescreen: an excuse to depersonalise the decision to surveil and thus evade responsibility.
Our article takes the form of a round table, inviting debate and discussion from diverse perspectives. We borrowed its title, “the art of strategic conversation”, from an acclaimed book on the practice. Prominent scenario planners Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson have also explained the approach by citing the novelist Carlos Fuentes:
The novel, like the scenario, enables conversational relations between readers and the writer in reading and rereading: “never again should we have only one voice or reading. Imagination is real and its languages multiple”.
We hope that our discussion will help scholars and practitioners alike to consider: in this time when we’re inundated by futures, so many of them intended to shape our decisions and achieve someone else’s goals, how can we use practices like scenario planning to gain critical distance and novel insights into the most pressing issues we face?
