"AI is Magic"

In June, the Berkman Klein Center invited an interdisciplinary group of creatives and technologists to experiment with fiction in a speculative design and writing workshop. Facilitated by BKC research assistant Ami Mehta, the workshop asked participants to imagine and explore alternative worlds of AI ethics by using magic systems as an analogical lens. With tables covered with wands, swords, and witch hats, participants were able to immerse themselves in a range of established magical worlds from literature, and investigate how societies narrate and regulate powerful, poorly-understood forces.

Through systems-analysis of vastly different kinds of magic, from the allure of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings to the tyranny of the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter series, participants grappled with difficult questions about governance, access, power, energy, class, risk, and accountability. Take Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson's rigidly class-stratified world where the ruling nobility controls not just access to magical ability, but the supply of the metals that fuel it. Or Christopher Paolini’s Eragon, where every spell that is cast directly squeezes the life and energy from the spellcaster’s own body or environment. Held next to AI, these fictional systems begin to shed light upon truths and complexities of our own world, crafting a provocative space for critical and generative discussion.

The workshop was structured in four stages to scaffold the cognitive leap from exploring fantasy worlds to hypothesizing about technology. Divided into small groups that were each assigned a text, the workshop asked each team to first study their given magic system: who accesses it, who governs it, what it costs, what it corrupts, and what are its limits.

The workshop’s final stage built on this fertile foundation with a ruminative, creative act. Participants selected a single strand of thought that interested them the most and individually wrote pieces of flash fiction in 200 words, materializing just a glimpse of a speculative world. This required embodying the systems they had been exploring up to that point — with characters, emotions, and senses — painting worlds of conflict and resolution.