Data, Power, and Possibility: Mapping Pathways Beyond AI Inevitability

If AI systems depend on vast amounts of data generated through our actions, relationships, communities, and everyday lives, what influence might we already hold in shaping technological futures? This interactive workshop invites participants to explore a different response to AI inevitability. Before we can reimagine technological futures, we must first understand how power, value, and influence already flow through the systems around us. Together, we’ll examine the relationship between data and AI, and envision it as a source of power and possibility. Through collaborative mapping activities, we will explore where in our lives data is generated, captured, and transformed into value; who benefits and who bears the costs; and reimagine those sites as opportunities for collective empowerment, negotiation, agency and preferred forms of stewardship. Drawing on participatory design, systems thinking, and futures practices, participants will create a shared map of the relationships and infrastructures shaping our digital lives while exploring how communities might exercise greater agency over the data they create together. This session is for researchers, artists, community activists, policy-makers, organizers, technologists, educators, and anyone interested in building more democratic, pluralistic, and community-centered technological futures

Part of the programme “A Day of Countering AI Inevitability: Reimagining and Reclaiming AI” at King’s College London on 8th July. Yutong Liu & Digit https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0