Tara McMullin

Ultimately, Agreements are a collective wish we make about how we might be in the same space together. That space could be a classroom, a sports team, a club, a conference, committees or boards, an organizing group. They reflect what we need to participate while feeling joyful, trusted, and brave.

But they also can be flimsy as hell.

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality. It is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

We cannot really conceive of the problems that will arise when we start trying to build a free society. What now seem likely to be the thorniest problems might not be problems at all; others that never even occurred to us might prove devilishly difficult. There are innumerable X-factors.

Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.