At the AI-Imaginations and Public Safety symposium at Erasmus University Rotterdam on June 19, DigiCon’s Sci-Fi Team experimented with an unconventional way of presenting academic ideas. When it comes to emerging technologies, the responsibility for understanding, explaining, and responding to them often falls to key figures. The most important of these arguably are philosophers, legal scholars, and tech creators. But as we’ve seen in the literature for years, there’s insufficient shared vocabulary, understanding, or common ground between these roles. For this reason, we prepared our own imaginary narrative for a trialogue between these roles on the issues that need to be discussed, in order to build bridges between the interrelated fields more effectively. Here, we share the full text of the trialogue.
PHILOSOPHER: In Solary, we live in hollow trees as high as flats, wide as silos, the insides providing many square meters to house families, with entire gardens on its broad branches. See there, little Robin and Ozan playing on Branchyard 8801! You outsiders see danger. I see design. Every step they take is observed. When their play edges too close to the precipice, security doesn’t panic. Leaves slip up, silently and predictably, to catch their fall.
A community that has all, yet deploys every force, most certainly every technological force, for maintaining inner balance. That might sound good, but actually, the inward forces lead to the community being on the edge of imploding. Technology has been used for ages to forge our surroundings with utmost accuracy, and it is here to secure us, bring us balance like a protective shield.
Determinists and optimists have spent centuries trying to decipher the relationship between humans and technology. But the question remains. Do we use technology, or does our so-called use mask a deeper form of abuse? Are we exploiting it, or merely submitting to its logic under the illusion of control? And what does this reveal about us, not as users, but as a species so eager to extend itself through machinery?
We see endless growth, but every trace of life is branching out and gets tangled up with one another. So, I can’t help but wonder, when there’s so little land left for us here, where are people supposed to work, to rest, to be human? There is the Divide, which took place centuries ago… But no, we can’t talk about that. Now the Creators claim they’ve found a solution. They launch things into the upper air, where there’s still space, and these inflate into temporary work zones. The duration of a given task is calculated and puff, up you go, only to come down again a few hours later after your work is done. Just like the machines we fear becoming, or fear are becoming us. As a philosopher, I’m restless. Are we meant to become extensions of technology? Should it reshape our social lives, and what makes us who we are? People torn from the earth, flung skyward like balloons, waiting to burst. Is this the evolution of the human with technology?
…
LEGAL ACADEMIC: These systems that monitor air toxicity, designate optimal living zones, or decide which tree receives resources; none of them are neutral. These models never ask who defines health. They transform the environment, and us, into variables, not constituents. The output may be efficiency, but the design is control.
It recalls pre-Divide literature on stratified societies. Inflatable workspaces, for instance, sound ingenious. Then the question becomes: Where do your rights reside? Who legislates at altitude? This isn’t just innovation, it’s jurisdictional disappearance. When we normalize vertical separations, we reintroduce class, not through ownership, but through elevation. And yield, like efficiency, is never impartial. It rewards access, algorithmic fluency, and system legibility. The legal system, my own domain, is complicit. It cannot regulate what it refuses to recognize. And at present, it refuses to name any of this.
CREATOR: You’re tuned in to a radio station that’s only channeled to your rearview. I urge you to adjust frequency so I can show you to look ahead and try and imagine roads we cannot see yet. So, instead of trying to regulate, can you channel what I do? It is what the people desire, they are accustomed to growth and expansion, and rightfully so. This technological change is embedded in our natural surroundings and makes our people freer, enables them to skyrocket up in the air, figuratively and literally. I’m working on tools for determining how long exactly people have to be up in the air to finish their task – we can’t be wasting fuel. All that this requires is more ingrained brain analysis. Insight in users’ previous task efficiency, stamina, neural capacity, and swiftness of the tongue for their task commanding. When Quantum Self-Attention Networks are linked with human neural pathways, the effects are immediate: exponential gains in creativity, decision-making, and throughput. Couple that with controlled work environments, zero-distraction, oxygen-regulated, inflatable workspaces, and we’re not just optimizing performance; we’re redesigning cognition itself. The outputs speak for themselves: cleaner code, sharper language, dense syntactic precision. The metrics confirm it; this is productivity, redefined.
LEGAL ACADEMIC: Meaning you haven’t exactly deciphered those outputs?
CREATOR: Well, not exhaustively, no.
LEGAL ACADEMIC: You speak of outputs, but can you explain them? Can your systems account for their own consequences, or just optimize them? If we cannot trace how a conclusion was reached, if no one can interpret it, then no one can be held responsible for it.
CREATOR: Grant me the freedom to figure this out, don’t try to prematurely terminate this journey. I assure you this will emancipate us all, all our communities!
PHILOSOPHER: I would like to show you that by making absolute your freedom to create, you exert all the more control over others, even if unconsciously. Our current time often has a knack for feeling near-apocalyptic at best. Navigating rapidly through a world grown out of proportion, much too complex. Looking back in a rearview mirror that shows a narrow frame of a past reality can be comforting. But it’s not just about reassurance. It can function as a simplified, aggregated display of either the dangers behind you that might just catch up, or the pleasantries that may reoccur ahead.
CREATOR: To me, it’s not about utility or comfort, but about stimulating consciousness about other realities, worlds, hiding in plain sight.
LEGAL ACADEMIC: We assume control because we engineered the systems, but engineering is not governance. These infrastructures now mediate daily life, yet they evolve faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to restrain them. There’s no democratic oversight, no accountability loop. Law lags behind, not just in pace, but in scope. The absence of resistance from these systems isn’t a sign of safety. It’s a sign that our safeguards were never registered.
CREATOR: Okay…hmm… but then… Let us not shy away from what happened during that last huge regulatory interference, the Divide. Divide didn’t solve conflict; it institutionalized division. Foundation models were used quite literally, to lay down who would belong where, not only in the present, but in genealogical futures pre-emptively assigned. The promise was peace. The cost was the elimination of political ambiguity. What little we hear of Polary, the other side – fragmentation, purging, silence – suggests that the logic of order doesn’t terminate in harmony. It metastasizes. And so, we don’t look. Not because we don’t want to know, but because the system was built to ensure that we can’t.
We should reconnect with Polary! Overcome our shortage of land and see whether both sides are willing to embrace conflict. I believe there’s a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple: to maintain and create coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Entire landscapes can come alive, filled with relationships and contending relationships within relationships.
PHILOSOPHER: Ah, yes…! Can one still form solidarity if there is no concrete, common enemy anymore? And what if the enemy is within us? I don’t mean within our community, but within our very selves. We are surrounded by external harmony, ever-improving, continuously adjusting to accommodate our shortcomings, but started failing to feel what balance is required to maintain ourselves.
LEGAL ACADEMIC: Solidarity erodes when every need becomes a service, and every service a private transaction. And when law ceases to recognise the collective, it forgets how to protect what binds us.
CREATOR: I see this has seeped into our doings as well. So, perhaps we should reimagine the paths not taken. Machines that expands choices, not reinforcing the execution of choices we’ve made before. I see now that machines shouldn’t push people to be like machines. What about trying to cultivate technology to be as close to being our reflections, without having that destructive side, our internal enemies?
LEGAL ACADEMIC: Technology doesn’t correct our politics; they preserve its blind spots, automate its omissions. Humanizing machines will not civilize the infrastructures that deploy them. It risks moralizing what should be governed and treating recognition as a substitute for responsibility. Not all regulation is traditional, and not all governance is just, but where no frameworks exist, accountability becomes ambient, optional, or lost.
PHILOSOPHER: Humans should not expect one another to become machines. And if machines have been created, they should be allowed to do what they were made to do, no more, no less. People must return to being human. Return to nature. To the soil that forms us. We should not repeat what we already know has failed.
We designed machines to assist us, to remind us of our humanity, not to resemble us. The goal was never imitation. We should work alongside them, in harmony, to improve the places we inhabit and leave them better for those who come after.
If we want a future that is green and sustainable, we must train machines according to the kind we actually want. And we must educate people to live with them in the way we deem just. Legal accountability on paper may suffice for now. But only education at the level of thought can safeguard what comes next.
PHILOSOPHER: Then let us begin with education. Not only of machines, but of ourselves. Let us build places where we learn not how to become like one another, but how to live with one another. Once we free ourselves from the idea that machines must become human, or that humans must become machine-like, we open the way for something else. not imitation, not coercion, but coexistence.
There was never a single correct path, no fixed design for what this future must be. That, perhaps, is our greatest freedom. If we understand this, then we are free to shape it together, with discretion and care.
After all, old humans did the opposite, and they failed each other, and they failed the Mother Earth. Let us not do the same to our beloved Solary. We do not have to have it all, we do not need to “have” something, we need to learn how to take care of it.
If your tools aim to liberate, then let them do so with us, not for us. If your laws aim to guide, let them protect not just what can be done, but what should be.
LEGAL ACADEMIC: A shared future cannot be built on aspiration alone. If we are to shape it together, we must ask: through which institutions, and under what guarantees? What begins as care can become control; what begins as guidance, governance without consent. If we are to be custodians, then let us also be accountable, to each other, to those excluded, and to the histories that made this necessary.
So yes, let us shape the future, but not by consensus alone. Let us shape it through accountability, through institutions capable, and through norms that do not confuse automation with progress. Hope must be structured. Otherwise, it repeats the very harm it hopes to transcend.
Etienne Valk
Has a background in music, sociology, and law.
Editor at DigiCon (sci-fi section)
Yeliz Figen Döker is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, where she works on AGI regulation. She is the co-founder and Head of Science Fiction at DigiCon.
Habibe Deniz Seval
Habibe Deniz Seval is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology, and Society. She is also a Geek and SciFi editor of DigiCon.
