Jesi Carson facilitated an Open Space discussion with several prompts generated using the People’s Consultation on AI report and AEFL Whatsapp group chat data provided by KK. Participants were invited to contribute new prompts as well.

Participants self-selected into four discussion groups, with one volunteer “host” per group whose role was to get the discussion rolling and start the note-taking process for the group to pick up. Everyone was invited to move between discussions as they chose. We had a share back from the discussions as a plenary to close the session (notes below taken manually from audio).

Audio was recorded for both the opening and closing, not in each individual discussion. Next meetup we hope to have recording devices in breakout groups as well. Photos from the meetup are here.

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Can AI Ethics Be Designed — or Only Practiced?

(Ethics: programmable systems vs human practice)

Discussion prompts:

• If ethics is context-dependent and human, what happens when we try to encode it into systems?
• Are “rules and constraints” a substitute for ethics—or something fundamentally different?
• Who gets to define what counts as “ethical” in AI systems?

Governance at Machine Speed: Is Democracy Too Slow?

(Governance vs speed)

Discussion prompts:

• If AI systems operate faster than humans can intervene, what does meaningful oversight look like?
• Can democratic processes exist in real-time, automated environments?
• Should we design systems that limit speed to preserve accountability?