Six takeaways from the People's AI Assembly

On Monday 19 October, the AI Now Institute and More Perfect Union hosted a sold-out event in New York City. The People’s AI Assembly aimed to reclaim public control over AI, and included speakers like Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York City, Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the NY Taxi Workers Alliance and KeShaun Pearson, director of Memphis Against Pollution who is fighting Elon Musk over his sprawling cluster of xAI data centres based in the predominantly Black community of Boxtown.

But the final session was the most inspiring. It was great to see best-selling authors Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy being interviewed by Karen Hao. After sessions on data centre pollution and workers’ rights, the final panel was intended to set a positive vision for the future. Naomi Klein has just published End Times Fascism (with Astra Taylor) and Arundhati Roy is famous for her quote “another world is possible, on a quiet day you can hear her breathing” (World Social Forum, 2003). 

It’s worth watching their entire conversation back in full. But, in the meantime, here are my highlights: 

1. Prioritise the living world: Naomi pointed out that most people desperately want to escape our modern lives. We are already over-stressed, over-worked and not happy. Social media simply creates more work for us. And is it even possible to create human-scale AI without pushing the planet to collapse? The key question is how do we “make life more liveable?” To beat the tech oligarchy, “we will all have to become more human, more loving, more animate, more present in our bodies, our cities, our towns, our communities, and in this living world.” 
2. Keep the mystery: Arundhati stressed that we shouldn’t forget that mystery and magic are intrinsically important to us as humans. “Whether it’s writing or whether it’s music or whether it’s art, at the heart of it is mystery…you cannot say why the world loved this particular band or this particular book – it’s a beautiful elusive secret. And what [the AI companies] do is to take all of it and look at it like a product no different from mosquito repellent or toothpaste.”
3. It’s a zero-sum game: Naomi pointed out that the big tech companies “are in a race to swallow the entire economy. You can see it in the documents of their IPOs. Elon Musk said that SpaceX has a potential future market of $28 trillion. That’s a few trillion dollars less than the entire US economy. Anthropic is telling their investors that they have a future market of $30 trillion – so they all believe that there’s really only one player that can win this.”
4. What about surplus humanity? Naomi put it bluntly: “After we have finished training the bots with our labour and our creativity and they’ve stolen all of our art and stolen all of our books…[what is our] economic function? It isn’t to consume and it isn’t to work. It is to be surveilled. It is to be killed…it’s to be contained, to be scanned.” And Arundhati drew the parallels with empire: “In India we were colonised by the East India Company and then that was taken over by the British crown…And so you’re looking at a situation where [these companies] are seeking to replace the state and fuse themselves into the state. Giving of course the shiny gifts of colonialism but taking away all forms of governance and all forms of freedom.”
5. We’re all on the frontline: Arunhati: “People like to separate the battle against data centers [from] the battle about climate [from] the battle of the arts but actually at the end of the day, all of us are on the frontline all of us are so all of us have to stand up!” And Naomi added that she can see the momentum building: “I have never seen a movement rise up this quickly, this organically…people are organising…people have found each other….this is not just a local fight. This is a national fight. It’s an international fight.”
6. We must remember joy: Naomi summed up by saying she doesn’t see AI making people any happier: “People are using [AI], but often that doing so joylessly, often doing so in a spirit of resignation, in a spirit of overwhelm, in a spirit of their bosses forcing them, in a spirit of this is the only job on offer, right? Which is why like we I think we need to understand as a movement that our job is not just to fight AI, it’s to make life worth living and more joyful for more people, right?

The assembly movement

In the UK, there are two people’s assemblies on AI happening in the next couple of week – in Cardiff and Brighton. Last summer, a report from the University of Edinburgh recommended that the UK government establish a permanent people’s assembly on AI. The Ada Lovelace Institute is currently setting up a community forum devoted to AI. And they’re also involved in a partnership led by Sheffield University calling on the United Nations to set up a citizen’s track on AI governance. This is just a handful of the projects I’ve seen – I have a feeling there are many more!

Watch the full event on YouTube: The People’s AI Assembly