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The Boston Review has published a forum on utopian visions for what AI could be. The introductory essay by Evgeny Morozov appears along with responses by Brian Eno, Audrey Tang, Terry Winograd, Bruce Schneier & Nathan Sanders, Sarah Myers West & Amba Kak, Wendy Liu, Edward Ongweso Jr., and Brian Merchant. In his opening salvo, Morozov poses the following "radically utopian question":

There’s relatively little effort to think about just what AI’s missing Other might be—whether in the form of a research agenda, a political program, a set of technologies, or, better, a combination of all three.

To close this gap, I want to offer a different way of thinking about AI and democracy. Instead of aligning with either the realists or the refuseniks, I propose a radically utopian question: If we could turn back the clock and shield computer scientists from the corrosive influence of the Cold War, what kind of more democratic, public-spirited, and less militaristic technological agenda might have emerged?

Morozov’s own sketch of an alternative path for AI draws on projects from the 1960s and 70s, including Project Cybersyn and the Environmental Ecology Lab. In his response to the other forum contributions, Morozov stresses that "The promise of technological alternatives lies not in replacing Silicon Valley’s digital imperialism with local variants but in reconceptualizing technology’s role outside the logic of capital accumulation."