Towards the Habermas Machine

Google DeepMind has just announced a large language model, which claims to generate a consensus position from a collection of individual views. The name of the model is a reference to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

An internet search for Habermas machine throws up two previous initiatives under the same name. Firstly an art project by Kristopher Holland.

The Habermas Machine (2006–2012) is a conceptual art experience that both examines and promotes an experiential relation to Jürgen Habermas’ grand theory for understanding human interaction. The central claim is that The Theory of Communicative Action can be experienced, reflected upon and practised when encountered within arts-based research. Habermas’ description of how our everyday lives are founded by intersubjective experience, and caught up in certain normative, objective and subjective contexts is transformed through the method of conceptual art into a process of collaborative designing, enacting and articulating. This artistic reframing makes it possible to experience the communicative structure of knowledge and the ontological structure of intersubjectivity in a practice of non-discursive ‘philosophy without text’. Feiten Holland Chemero

And secondly, an approach to Dialogue Mapping described as a device that all participants can climb into and converse with complete communicative rationality, contained in a book by @paulculmsee and Jailash Awati, and mentioned in this Reddit post Why is Dialogue Mapping not wide spread? Dialogue Mapping was developed by Jeff Conklin and others as an approach to addressing wicked problems. See also Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS).

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Update

Christopher Summerfield, one of the authors of the DeepMind paper, spoke at the Royal Society on October 29th 2024. https://www.youtube.com/live/cW1Wq7_8v1Y?si=oqo8Lw7479x4QqKt&t=18890

All the examples shown in his talk were policy matters that could be reduced to Yes/No questions. Such questions would traditionally be surveyed by asking people to place themselves on a scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, and it is easy to see how a language-based method such as the Habermas Machine offers some advantages over a numerical scale. But not clear how this works for more provocative questions, let alone wicked problems.

Someone in the audience asked if this method would work in what he called a compromised democracy, and Summerfield acknowledged that the method assumes what he called a good faith scaffold. Obviously all democracies in the real world are imperfect, and he didn't go into the question as to how sensitive or vulnerable the method might be to such imperfections, but the method might conceivably help to overcome some of these imperfections under some conditions: for example, Summerfield referred specifically to the tyranny of the majority.

While the performance of the Habermas machine in their study compared favourably with the performance of human mediators, Summerfield suggested that we should move away from thinking about AI in these terms. The point is not to create AI-based agents that can behave like intelligent people but to build intelligent institutions - tools for creating social order and fostering cooperation. As my regular readers will know, orgintelligence has long been an important theme for this blog. See for example my post On Organizations and Machines (January 2022).

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Jeffrey Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (Wiley 2006). See also CogNexus website.

Paul Culmsee and Jailash Awati, The Heretic's Guide to Best Practice (2013)

Nicola Davis, AI mediation tool may help reduce culture war rifts, say researchers (Guardian, 17 October 2024)

Tim Elmo Feiten, Kristopher Holland and Anthony Chemero, Doing philosophy with a water-lance: art and the future of embodied cognition (Adaptive Behavior 2021) 

Michael Tessler et al, AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation (Science, 18 October 2024)

Beyond the symbols vs signals debate (The Royal Society, 28-29 October 2024)

Wikipedia: Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), Wicked Problem

See also Influencing the Habermas Machine (November 2024)