The following article is about using AI and technologies as a community to enhance and expand individual and community capacity and agency rather than diminish them. It describes the aims of a particular local project but deals with a civilisational concern.
I am sharing this ahead of the Newham Citizen Science Fair (28 March) as an invitation to dialogue — not as a finished position but as a proposed framework to test, question and refine together.
A Means not an End
Negotiating AI as a Community (NAIC) approaches AI as a means — something to be used skillfully for our shared wellbeing — not as an end in itself to be chased out of hype or fear of missing out. NAIC is not an end either
The Mission
Our mission is simple:
- To use AI as an organisational tool that increases the competence, connection, coherence and cognitive capacity of community and community groups by structuring complexity. To move data to information to knowledge.
- To use AI as a dialogical tool that strengthens our ability to think clearly as individuals — and to think well together as communities. To move knowledge to understanding and right action.
NAIC is not about machines and algorithms. It is about asserting the value of people in the age of the machine and algorithms.
The NAIC project is an initiative of Netstorms Limited (my business identity) and Newham Mosaic (the community identity of an informal collaboration). It began with a workshop series subtitled “Building a Borough Brain.” But the “brain” we are building is not a computer. The brain is us in dialogue as a community augmented by AI tools. It is dependent on networking people, not computers.
We are aiming for something I call ‘Augmented Community Intelligence’ (ACI) — a community that uses AI dialogically to enhance collaboration, learning, and collective decision-making.
NAIC is community building in the age of AI.
The organisational use of AI in the community is being explored as we work with community organisations — such as the Climate Emergency Centres network to structure information — including information from WhatsApp conversations and Webinars so that it is more accessible and more easily deployed.
The dialogical use of AI includes using it to support democratic reasoning and decision making not only by accessing information but also by facilitating wider understanding through questioning that understanding, by presenting and comparing different perspectives and alternative understandings.
At the heart of the NAIC project is the notion of Dialogue as the foundation of human intelligence, both individual and collective. As someone arguably over fond of acronyms I came up with the acronym DREAMS — Dialogue, Reflection, Ethics, Awareness, Meditation and Storytelling, as a counterpoint to STEAM — Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. I contrast these two framings as existential and instrumental, introspective and extrospective or as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, meditative thinking and calculative thinking.
In highlighting the two contrasting perspectives, the existential and the instrumental, I don’t mean to preference one over the other. The existential without the instrumental is contemplation without enactment while the instrumental without the existential is production without meaning.
In music, counterpoint is not opposition, it is the interrelation of independent themes. Two melodies sounding at once, distinct but harmonically engaged. This is the engagement that NAIC seeks to facilitate. It is not about opposition to or adoption of new technologies ‘because they are there’, it is concerned with the harmonic engagement of AI and other technologies with human purpose, autonomy and wellbeing. Our argument is that DREAMS and STEAM are both essential for human flourishing.
It is purpose and people that DREAMS brings to STEAM, placing beside ‘Performance Indicators’, ‘Purpose Indicators’ and ‘People Indicators’
The metrics vary according to sector but across sectors, institutional Performance Indicators overwhelmingly measure:
- Quantity
- Speed
- Cost
- Output
- Compliance
- Growth
They are rooted in calculative thinking, optimising processes, but do not easily capture:
- Trust
- Meaning
- Shared purpose
- Dialogue quality
- Ethical reflection
- Collective intelligence
These are often rhetorically affirmed but structurally undermeasured in corporate or institutional goals. They are, however, central community and human goals and DREAMS brings them to the table, as explicit measures of relational and ethical health, so that what we deliver is not simply performative but is purposive and people oriented.
DREAMS is not just an acronym or mnemonic. It describes a process.
- Dialogue that is honest, inclusive and informed, courageous but not combative.
- Reflection that introduces pause, self-questioning and guards against group think.
- Ethics that align production and processes with people, purposes and principles.
- Awareness that includes the impacts of decisions of people and on the environment.
- Meditation as the carving of space for relationship with self, others and the environment, not as an optional extra but as a self and community empowering discipline.
- Storytelling is the articulation of experience that allows us to integrate it personally and as communities.
DREAMS are existential, they are of the soul of humanity and are what we need to consciously bring to the machine. One teacher asked, “What does it profit us if we gain the world and lose our soul?” Technology amplifies capability. Without existential grounding, amplification accelerates alienation.
AI and institutional measurement systems become extractive when they amplify calculative outputs without renewing relational trust and ethical agency.
DREAMS asserts the value of people in the age of the machine and algorithms. The NAIC invitation is an invitation to take DREAMS seriously because that is what preserves our humanity.
But NAIC is not DREAMS alone, it is the instrumentalisation of DREAMS and STEAM for human and community purpose and wellbeing. It is intended to promote and support the socially ‘generative’ rather than socially ‘extractive’ use of AI and technology and is congruent with sustainability thinking about generative vs extractive economies.
The website ‘Lifestyle Sustainability Directory’ discusses this extensively.
I am not currently in a position to advocate for the Directory and its authors as I need to explore it further, but I certainly recommend it for exploration and dialogue. The following passage has conceptual contiguity with the thought I shared above about Storytelling as part of DREAMS:
Social Media Narrative Sharing involves the communication of personal or organizational stories, experiences, and perspectives across digital platforms to build connection, convey identity, or influence public opinion. This practice leverages the storytelling capabilities of social media to construct and disseminate specific accounts of reality.
My caution about this and a point of difference in emphasis is that NAIC is less about sharing experience to influence public opinion than about sharing experience to engender empathy and thought.
Social media narratives can be extractive when part of algorithmic imperatives. We should be cautious about this, understanding that the sharing of narratives is not only about reach and influence (the instrumental dimension) but about empathetic and dialogical connection and engagement (the existential dimension). This understanding is central to Negotiating AI as a Community — especially when we understand AI in its broader sense as ‘Algorithmic Intelligence,’ i.e. as algorithmic systems that shape what we see, share and prioritise
Narratives, any narratives, have to be run through the sieve of STEAM-DREAMS. Cognitive and ethical rigour is not only for the propositions that seem intuitively wrong to us but also for those that seem intuitively right. The invitation to NAIC is an invitation to develop the skills to organise information into structured accessible knowledge, to participate in the informed community dialogues that turn knowledge into understanding and to work together to translate understanding into personal and community responsibility, monitoring and action.