Governments around the world have prioritized the short-term profit of industry and capital at the expense of the environmental health of countless species - could a citizens' council advised by AI and scientists set new standards for humanistic policies? CitizenAI is a participatory laboratory that creates an open mindspace for citizens to navigate the climate catastrophe. Climate-care actions are developed and discussed. With the help of System Dynamics, LLM (Large Language Model) and scientific advice from the GERIX research institute, participants' ideas are evaluated and analyzed for their impact on health, happiness and environmental parameters in Europe. The aim is to further participatory modes of governance, to initiate critical dialogues on climate protection, capitalism and AI, and to identify concrete urban actions in the context of climate change. 

DescriptionCitizenAI explores a possible near future in which the EU's climate policy is transferred to a citizens' council advised by AI and science. Governments around the world have prioritized the short-term gain of industry and capital at the expense of the environmental health of countless species - could an AI set new standards for humanistic policy? With the project "CitizenAI" we create a participatory laboratory that promotes a structural, public discourse on the climate catastrophe, capitalism and AI and offers citizens the opportunity to participate in the political decision-making process in this context. The citizens discuss and negotiate with each other and try out experimental forms of grassroots democratic political discourse, prototyping participatory governance. Citizen AI took place for the first time as part of the CityScienceLab Hamburg research project and the CityScience meets CreativeCoding festival in 2023.

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The project was divided into two phases: an intervention in the public space in the form of a poster campaign announcing that policy on climate protection issues will be transferred to citizen-oriented AI in the near future and inviting citizens to participate in the process of training the AI. With the poster campaign, we wanted to create a constructive provocation that attracts general attention to the topic and unsettles the relationship between the status quo and possible future scenarios. 

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The second phase was a participatory lab where participants can engage in conversations with GERICS scientist Gaby Langendijk and interact with two tools we have developed: a system dynamics platform and an artificial intelligence entity (LLM) called "Eco Oracle", which has been fine-tuned with the theories of six critical thinkers (Antonio Gramsci, Donna Haraway, Vandana Shiva, Audre Lorde, Extinction Rebellion) and the IPCC report. The exploratory modeling system simulates the effects of 12 different actions against climate catastrophe under different aspects, namely the well-being and health of citizens, CO2 reduction, political stability and the resources needed to implement the actions. The speculative modeling was developed through numerous discussions with various climate researchers. The exploratory modeling system is publicly available in the form of an interactive online platform, thus ensuring the sustainability of the project Climate Action Model.

In our lab, participants are divided into small groups to jointly determine a combination of actions to achieve the European climate targets. The participants make a selection of actions that they deem most suitable. On the one hand, proposals from GERICS scientist Gaby Langendijk include aquaponic food production, social urban emissions trading systems and car-free cities. On the other hand, we have implemented proposals from our trained AI system, the Eco Oracle, which focuses on systemic changes such as collaborative governance, circular economy models and interspecies coexistence policies. Participants' decisions are processed by the exploratory modeling system (EMS) developed by Rico Herzog (City Science Lab) and evaluated in terms of their impact on health, peace, political stability, CO2 and resources.The Eco Oracle provides a summary and evaluates which of the groups can best drive the systemic change required to implement the necessary climate protection on a global level. By limiting the resources available to implement the proposed solutions, the discussion is gamified and both groups compete to achieve the most positive effect on the above evaluation criteria with the available resources.

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Questions explored: how can artificial intelligence and participatory governance models be used to shape a sustainable planetary society and develop enhanced climate policies that take into account the interests and needs of citizens? How can artificial intelligence help to develop a vision of a sustainable society and outline concepts for a collaborative and inclusive level of consciousness that prioritizes climate action and sustainability? How can these visions and concepts help shape new forms of governance and citizenship based on humanistic values? And how can artificial intelligence support citizens in making informed decisions on climate actions and sustainability issues, while enabling dialog and participatory governance on these decisions?

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