We won't labour too long to compile the background to this Key Challenge. All of us, everyday, are inundated with stories of technological "disruption"; of how technology is going to solve our problems, make us rich and famous, save the world or destroy democracy. Companies trumpet their technological solutions to the world's problems. Politicians trumpet their technological solutions to whatever ails the community.

AI is going to steal our jobs. AI is going to eliminate drudgery.

But whether the messages are hopeful or frightening, they all assume that reality is too complex for humans to compute. But it's not too complex for computers to compute. And so, people are replaceable by computers. The only relevant questions are:

1. Who will win and who will lose? And,
2. Will we be wise enough to make computers that serve our needs, or will the computers one day put their needs before ours?

Except: those aren't the only relevant questions. They're not even the most relevant questions. The most relevant questions are:

1. Are our assumptions about the superiority of computers for understanding reality correct?
2. And if these assumptions are not correct, then what mistakes might we be engineering by pretending they are? And how might we change how we expand computing power into our lives, if we operated with different ideas about how computers and humans each make sense of the world?
3. Do we have a sense of the place we wish humans to operate in, given a world of automation? What domains of life are reserved for humans regardless of computer ability (e.g. art, music, etc.)?
4. What fallacies are we embracing through our search to understand the human mind through the sense of AI and computers? This is a crucial assumption to remodel if we are to facilitate a new understanding of the relationship between human and computer. A great contextual piece on this can be found here: https://aeon.co/essays/your-br...

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INPUT REQUEST #2: Background

• What ideas or questions did the list of background ideas raise in your mind? What references in the background are unclear to you?
• What further clarification of the background information would be helpful, or what is missing?