🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses a critical gap in current responsible innovation and AI ethics frameworks, which largely overlook the agency of technology practitioners within geopolitical contexts and the narrative structures in which they are embedded. The project proposes an AI-driven interactive storytelling system that integrates speculative scenarios, archetypal character modeling, and collaborative reflection workshops to guide technologists—through non-didactic means—in critically examining the implicit values, assumptions, and positionalities embedded in their technical practices. By uniquely merging speculative narrative with geopolitical reflection, this approach transcends conventional moral prescriptivism, offering practitioners a novel methodological tool to explore the entanglements of technology, power, and geopolitics, thereby fostering a heightened critical awareness of the geopolitical dimensions of their work.
📝 Abstract
This paper presents a speculative Human-Computer Interaction design proposal for encouraging geopolitical reflexivity amongst tech workers at geopolitically relevant technology companies. Recent scholarship in International Relations and Science and Technology Studies increasingly recognizes technology firms and their workers as geopolitical actors whose decisions shape international dynamics. However, existing Responsible Innovation and Responsible AI approaches rarely engage with the geopolitical narratives and imaginaries that underpin contemporary AI development. Building upon RI scholarship on reflexivity, reflective HCI, and creative HCI work on computational narratives, this paper proposes an AI-enabled interactive narrative system in which users engage with a speculative scenario centred on technology, power, and geopolitics. Through narrative interaction, archetype assignment, and socially scaffolded workshop reflection, the system aims to encourage target users to critically examine their assumptions, values, and positionality within broader sociotechnical systems. We argue that speculative narrative systems may offer a productive avenue for introducing geopolitical reflexivity into responsible technology initiatives without relying on prescriptive or moralising approaches.