Collaboration is a form of wealth.

Conversation is the currency of collaboration.

C4’s mission is to embed members from all walks of life

into the collaboration economy, to ideate, design and
make available new conversation templates that yield
collaborative wealth for all.

Come, try a crazy thing called collaboration ....

The Future Festival is a series of round-tables addressing questions
at the intersection of Art, Science, Society, and Technology.
 January 25th 2019

India’s first round-table on AI in the Indian context.

What do we mean by AI?

Is there, or could there be an ‘Indian AI’?

How could society as a whole both shape and benefit from Indian AI?

How far has Indian AI come?

Where do we stand, in relation to the rest of the world?

What key elements or components are missing/under-developed?

How do we plug gaps, catalyze the Ecosystem?

What novel structures do we need to govern Indian AI?

How do we stay engaged? How can each one of us contribute,

by leveraging our respective strengths?
 Participating at the round-table

C4 welcomes collaborators from all stages and walks of life at the

upcoming round-table. A non-exhaustive list of interest-areas is shown in the
next page, but there are no restrictions on participation. Students,
working professionals, entrepreneurs, academics and industry veterans are
equallly welcome, because all viewpoints matter.

During the session, collaborators will remain anonymous and be seated in a

circle with no particular reference to their background in order to
create a level playing field. Collaborators will attempt to both ask and
answer questions, guided by a moderator. Multiple whiteboards and
flipcharts will be used to visually capture thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

C4 will endeavor to mine the output from the session in order to

build thought-leadership material, and seed community-level initiatives that
could benefit the Indian AI movement. The material will be shared within the
community, plus special efforts made to promulgate relevant material
with a larger group of stakeholders (Education, Government, Industry).

Your participation does not end with the round-table, it rather begins here.
Given the voluntary nature of this platform, the community will
need to find creative ways of staying engaged, in order to breathe life into
initiatives that emerge at the round-table. The C4 Telegram group and
sub-groups thereof will serve as conduits for sustained online engagement.
Follow-on round-tables will be scheduled as and when new developments
occur, or when the community feels the need for a port-call.
Interests that you might represent

Music

Cinema

Art

Technology

Media

Skills

Livelihoods

Manufacturing

Finance

Education

Government

Transportation

Defence

Healthcare & Life-Sciences

What impact are we likely to create in the short-term?

A highly inter-disciplinary community, one that could shape

Indian AI for years to come, will have been birthed

Mechanisms to crowdsource intelligence and turn them into

insights and capacities for thought-leadership will have
developed

Community members will have been infused with initative,

a conscious feeling of reponsibility towards a larger cause, one
that binds a large specturm of stakeholders

Barriers for Innovation will have been lowered, serving

as a catalyst for the further development of Indian AI

What is our long-term vision?

A national level AI policy by 2021

 Registration

There are multiple ways to register for the upcoming round-table.

The easiest is to join the C4 Telegram group, where you introduce yourself
and also express interest in the upcoming roundtable. The
groups’ QR Code and link are below.

Alternatively, you could mail us at team@collaboration4.org

https://t.me/joinchat/FFvRrkhi7yhk6JHGpMxv9A
The round-table dialogue: a process view
 Dialogue-Ing!

Humans produce thoughts virtually all the time. Each one of our
interactions with our living environment, is a stimulus and a
response.

Do we know our own thoughts?

Do we know the contents of our thoughts?

Do we know how our thoughts are structured?

Do we know how to classify our thoughts in different

ways?

Do we know the dynamics of changing thoughts?

Do we know how to learn a new thought?

Do we know how to produce a new thought?

Do we know how to share a thought?

 Dialogue-Ing!

To know, classify, structure, understand the dynamics of, learn or

produce a new thought, one needs to be in a dialogue - a dialogue either
with onself, or with others. Dialogues allow us to detach, observe
what’s going in our own thoughts. Without dialogue, our thoughts remain
invisible. Think of dialogues as mechanisms for thought, thinking about
thought, and think about thinking about thought .... 3 levels!

Level 3 - Thinking
about, thinking
about thought. Generalization

This is the realm of Insight.

Insights are models with
power - power of prediction,
explanation or action.
Long-term
memory Level 2 - Thinking
about thought.

Abstraction,
Creation

Analysis, Dialogue, also helps structure

Comparison thought, classify it as opinion,
fact, prediction etc.

Level 1 - Thought
Dialogue produces thought
 Dialogue-Ing!

Dialogues, if executed well over time, produce new thought with predictive
,explanatory or actionable value. We call this insight. If insight is codified
in a form that can be stored in memory - human or machine, you end
up with knowledge. Knowledge can then be used to create/produce thoughts,
so the cycle continues. Usually, we don’t even notice these stages in the
cycle. A domain of inquiry (e.g Nature) becomes a field (e.g Physics),
when the cycle as a whole is codified (storeable in memory), so that just
about anyone can master the knowledge therein to produce thoughts (e.g predictions
or experiments), process thoughts (e.g result of an experiment) and make
a contribution (e.g arguments to improve a model). In essence, a ‘theory’
emerges, and the dialogue then is directed by that theory.

Thought in the form of processing of results

Dialog
ue
ce
n
te
red
on t
heory

Thought in Thought in the

the form of an form of a result
argument

Thought with predictive or

actionable value
 Dialogue-Ing!

Artificial-Intelligence or AI, is still a domain of inquiry, not (yet) a field with

one or more unified theories. In this state, a dialogue on AI will still
produce more questions, and these questions will still lead to statements
of opinion, ideas, a few facts (arising from recent successes in AI), and these
in turn will be structured and classified. In other words, any dialogue
on AI will resemble a dialogue on taxonomy in the 19th century. The
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ongoing processes of abstraction, analysis and comparison depend
on access to a diverse set of participants who can think creatively (to abstract
better), ask questions (to analyse better) and communicate well
(to compare better). Hence diversity is more valuable than specialization
at this stage, and restricting partipation to AI practitioners only is likely
to produce poor results later on, when generalization becomes possible.

Dialogue Quality

Stagnation

Balanced trajectory

Hasty advancement

State of
advancement of
inquiry
 Your preparation for the round-table

Page 3 of this document contains the general inquiry questions that we will
attend to at the round-table. You would do well to start having a
dialogue with yourself (which we do all the time!) on each of these
questions - such as by trying to write answers for each. Don’t be too
concerned about the veracity of your answers - no matter who you are,
this isn’t a practical goal. You would rather focus on asking yourself why
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you think these thoughts, that is have a level 2 (page 10) dialogue
with yourself. Also, try to tune into your own background, experiences.
Ideas might be aplenty, but perspective isn’t cheap. Your perspective
is what really matters, so the focus really needs to be for you to
present your perspective, while also learning other perspectives -
the difference in perspectives is what sustains dialogue, leads to
useful abstractions, analysis, structure and categories.

Enter into a dialogue, with yourself, or with others you manage to co-pt. Proceed
to level 2, where you’re able to look at your own thoughts, and understand where they come
from

Your perspective matters. Attempt to remain true to your background, experiences, while also
remaining receptive to other perspectives

No two perspectives are the same. Even slight differences in perspective are sufficient to
support dialogue - the small differences compell ensuing participants to ‘shift’ their thoughts,
heightening attention, and driving accomodation - where ensuing thoughts are linked or
comparable to previous ones. This creates coherence in the overall dialogue.
 Dialogue aftermath

As alluded to on Page 12, opinions, ideas and questions are likely to be

the primary output of the inaugural round-table on AI, and even these
would be of a tentative nature. Our first processing step would be to
summarize these - while the dialogue is still fresh in the minds of the
participants. The raw video footage, and transcript thereof will be
shared with the community, and participants asked (post facto) to agree/
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disagree with the contents of the summary. The second step will
then be a creative one, an extension to the dialogue, one where abstractions
will be generated and feedback solicited on the same. These
abstractions will target our explanatory, predictive, and action-oriented
needs. All three will be continously tested against reality - for instead,
actionable abstractions will be tried out in the field, explanatory abstractions
could be used in daily conversations, to see if they transmit understanding.
This ensures that dialogue-quality (a combination of the community’s
depth and breadth, and closure of inquiry) is in step with the state of
advancement of the inquiry itself (see page 13).

Produce a summary of the dialogue - listing opinions, questions, facts are other categories
of thought elicited.

Use feeebdack to verify the summary

Generate abstractions as a creative extension

Test abstractions by using them