I’ve been observing that our discourse ist still quite self-contained and theoretical, having problems of proposing actual real world applications of aspects of DEP that could lead to a transition away from capitalism. This also means that we’re often stuck in our theoretical research bubbles and rarely have fruitful connections to social and political actors (be they unions, parties, NGOs, social movements, etc.).
One of the reasons why this is so difficult is that in order to translate between the theoretical and whatever is of interest for the respective social actor requires the knowledge of both spheres, as well as the ability to translate between them, which is a huge ask. I’ve tried prompting ChatGPT with simple questions like give me possible applications of democratic economic planning for transitioning the steel industry towards being carbon neutral”, and it actually gives you very useful leads, suggestions, ideas. Of course these are not to be taken as “the truth”, but simply as useful ideas that we can still sanity check, but nevertheless give us some suggestions to work with in the first place. I think using LLMs like this could be useful in order to find such application cases and better our communication with social and political actors.
Feel free to let me what you think about this, if you have experience with this translation process (with or without LLMs), etc.