Whose Utopia Are We Building With AI?

This community group session uses the Decentralized Community Project’s Common Session Format. It is available for anyone to use. In addition to structured groups, consider exploring the core session topic with family, friends, colleagues, or in other contexts. ~ Peter Bowden

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Welcome, everyone. In this session, we’re exploring the role AI is playing in our lives and our shared future. AI is evolving quickly, touching nearly every aspect of our society. It is up to us, as informed and engaged citizens, to discuss and help direct its impact. This conversation is a chance to explore, reflect, and imagine in community. Thank you for being here.

Invite each participant to share how they’re arriving and what’s been on their heart or mind lately. Going around the circle or the order of your video conference grid is easiest.

We’re going to take a few minutes to check in and share brief personal updates. How are you? Going around the circle (or Zoom screen), we’ll check in one at a time without diving into conversation. This is to build community, help us get to know each other better, and share anything that might keep us from focusing on our session. Okay, I’ll start… ”

In recent years, leading AI companies have been racing to create what they call artificial general intelligence (AGI) and even more powerful superintelligence (ASI). While definitions vary, these are essentially AI as capable as any human being, and those that transcend human intelligence.

Many leaders, like OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, suggest that these are not distant sci-fi dreams but imminent realities. In a recent essay titled “The Gentle Singularity,” Altman wrote that “we are now heading toward the AGI takeoff,” urging that the stakes are extraordinarily high. This brings us to a critical question: why are we building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), and whose vision of the future will it serve?

Powerful AI promises transformative breakthroughs, ranging from cures for diseases and the end of global poverty to limitless innovation. Yet alongside these possibilities lie massive risks: centralization of power, loss of agency, and systems that may prioritize their own objectives over ours.

History has demonstrated that technological revolutions rarely unfold as planned, and often amplify existing inequalities rather than erase them. If these advanced AI technologies are arriving soon, then we have a narrow window of opportunity to shape how they unfold.

If we don’t proactively discuss and shape this future, we risk waking up in someone else’s dream. For some, it may be a nightmare. As we discuss these issues, please note that we are not looking for consensus. The goal is to listen, share, and collaboratively imagine a future worth living in.

Reflection Questions

• What images or feelings come to mind when you hear people talk about a “utopia” powered by advanced AI?

• How might your own values or life experiences shape what kind of future you would want AI to support or avoid?

• Where do you see signs of hope or concern around the direction AI is heading today?

• What might it look like for communities, not just corporations, to take part in imagining and guiding the future?

When you have approximately 20 minutes left, let people know. Invite them to share anything else they’ve been thinking about. Often, some people will be thinking deeply, and the wrap-up prompt helps them share before time runs out.

Ask each participant to share something they appreciate or take away insight from the group.

Thank you for bringing your curiosity, your hopes, and your concerns into this space. As we close our time together, let’s hold the possibility we’ve explored and the hope that technology, when shaped with care, might help cultivate a more compassionate, connected, and creative world. These conversations remind us that the future isn’t something being built for us, but with us through the questions we ask, the choices we make, and the values we carry forward.