A Public Option for AI
In the near future, in a city much like your own… something is about to change.
Public Option for AI (PO4AI) is an immersive experience designed for elected officials and city staff to explore how residents’ voices might be centered in decision-making around public-interest technologies.
Over the course of three acts, participants live out a day in the life of Regina Donahue, Mayor of the fictional city of Pallard, in an immersive audiodrama; attend an in-fiction lecture on the basics of machine learning; and play a cooperative role-playing game designing a new algorithmic tool for the city of Pallard.
At its core, PO4AI urges city governments to reclaim their power in shaping the design and governance of civic technologies, rather than ceding this agency (and responsibility!) to unaccountable private-sector suppliers.
To put our cards on the table, here’s what we believe: the most critical partners in cities’ efforts to take advantage of the affordances of machine-learning technologies are not tech companies, but the residents they serve everyday.
Interested in bringing PO4AI to your city?