Prototyping tensions: How to talk to your colleagues about AI

Current imaginaries of AI are pulled in opposing directions. On the utopian side, AI is being projected as the better half of humankind, evening out the fallibility of human bias and our inability to “know it all”. On the dystopian side, AI will make humans either obsolete or turn humans into overly optimized cogs in a machine. The reality will most likely lie somewhere in between, in an uncomfortable grey zone of compromises, tradeoffs and negotiations of values and desired futures. In this conversation, we explore the tensions between contrasting imaginaries, which we present as four different positions from which the future development of AI is often approached, and discuss the arising tensions between them.