Recipe series. 1st describing DITL

Designing tech with friction

This recipe is about designing an entire democratic process—not just the AI tool within it. When AI is introduced into a deliberative setting, the surrounding process needs to change too: not just to make the AI work, but to make sure the democracy works.

This document examines autonomy as a form of agentive control grounded in attention regulation, goal-directed action, and reflexivity.

The source, which comprises excerpts from Module A of the KT4D Social Risk Toolkit, explores the complex challenge presented by artificial intelligence to individual autonomy and free will within modern society.

This section considers how people’s autonomy and free will are hindered or supported by past and present KTs. By focusing on the structural level, we will examine systemic issues such as monopolies over KTs, data extraction and colonialism, labour, and political participation.

This section analyses how different knowledge technologies impact people’s attention and, consequently, their decisions regarding which information is worth storing and remembering, and which is instead forgotten or not even registered in the first place.