Most of the time we interview people who say No to AI. In this interview, Georgia and Alix talk to two people who look at AI and ask How and For What. And lots of other questions too.

Divya Siddarth and Zarinah Agnew from the Collective Intelligence Project share CIP’s work using AI systems to explore more consultative democratic governance, how to reframe the social and relational of knowledge, to pull our thinking out of the individual frame and into collective and communal applications.

In Zarinah’s words, they are interested in what happens “between brains, not within brains”. A ‘community chat bot’ might sound cringe but Divya and Zarinah are doing work to make these valuable and useful, rather than addictive and sycophantic. If you’re skeptical of the utility of engaging in these toxic corporate towers of AI at all, this is an episode for you.

Further reading & resources

• Why We Need an Amistics for AI by Brain Boyd
• Collective constitutional AI project with CIP and Anthropic
• Global Dialogues launch announcement
• I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered by Joseph Cox from 404 Media
• Worker Power & Big Tech Bossmen w/ David Seligman
• The Orb Will See You Now by Billy Perrigo
• The Intimacy Dividend by Shuwei Fang

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Divya Siddarth is the executive director and co-founder of CIP. Previously, she has been a political economist and social technologist in Microsoft’s Office of the CTO, the AI and Democracy lead at the U.K.’s AI Safety Institute, and held positions at the Ethics in AI Institute at Oxford, the Ostrom Workshop, and the Harvard Safra Center. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Computational Decision Analysis in 2018.

Zarinah is Research Director at the Collective Intelligence Project, where they work on transforming public input into impactful change in the AI ecosystem. Previously a neuroscientist, Zarinah now focuses on the science of collectivity and emerging related technologies. Zarinah is faculty at the London College of Political Technology where they teach on Future Crafting. In their spare time, some might argue, they run too many non-profits.