Stefaan Verhulst
Report by Tessa Dunlop, Ventseslav Kozarev, Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Paulo Rosa: “Citizen engagement processes can be transformative, especially for participating citizens. But what is their impact on policymaking, democratic systems and the broader public? This report maps a range of impacts across policy, institutions and society. Qualitative interview and survey data reveal that public administrations that engaged in citizen participation saw significant benefits, including improved policymaking, stronger democracies, greater legitimacy and increased trust in government, so much so that they are ready to conduct other participatory exercises. The study suggests and illustrates a number of indirect impact pathways, indicating that the extent of policy impact may be underestimated. Furthermore, citizen engagement drives culture change within institutions and enhances their capacity to engage more directly with citizens. Looking through a relational lens, citizen engagement processes foster closer connections between citizens and policymaking, but also between stakeholders, civil society, citizens, policymakers, and others. Key factors include the commitment of institutions and policymakers, and public communication about citizen engagement processes. Overall, the key message is that desired impact should be the starting point of citizen engagement processes, not an afterthought – support may erode if citizens and policymakers cannot see tangible outcomes. Commissioning bodies and organisers should prioritise commitment, legitimacy, and integration to ensure meaningful impacts…(More)”.
Paper by Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan: “In 1932, Bernard Baruch, a wealthy financier who made his fortune on Wall Street in the early 20th century, contributed the foreword to a reprint of the 1852 edition of Charles Mackay’s classic book on markets, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Invoking a dictum from Friedrich von Schiller, a German poet and philosopher, Baruch wrote: “Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd, heat once becomes a blockhead.” He added, “Without due recognition of crowd-thinking (which often seems crowdmadness) our theories of economics leave much to be desired.” About 40 years later, Eugene Fama, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, published “Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work.” It is among the most famous papers ever written in finance. This might be considered the theory Baruch had in mind. Fama posited, “A market in which prices always ‘fully reflect’ available information is called ‘efficient.’” Fama found that strategies investors commonly applied to try to outperform the market, including using past price patterns to project the future and doing fundamental analysis to distinguish between price and value, failed in their objective. In other words, there is no reliable way to take advantage of the blockheads. Nearly all those who study markets carefully agree that they appear sensible for the most part, as theory would have it, but periodically go bonkers. Having one framework to accommodate both realities is useful. James Surowiecki wrote about such an approach in 2004. Riffing on Mackay’s madness of crowds, Surowiecki called his book, The Wisdom of Crowds. He showed that crowds can be remarkably accurate in reflecting objective values or outcomes. Indeed, the prices generated by collectives commonly converge on the proper theoretical price in experimental settings…(More)”
Paper by Weston Anderson et al: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods offer substantial promise for monitoring and predicting acute food insecurity when paired with domain experts as part of a trusted and accountable system. However, using AI/ML-based methods may cause costly, dangerous mistakes if implemented uncritically. Funding for humanitarian aid has been drastically cut, putting tremendous pressure on food security early warning systems to use AI as a means of cutting costs. In this Comment, we outline where AI/ML methods offer promise to make early warning systems more adaptable and effective as well as where the use of AI/ML is ill advised. We recommend that AI/ML be used to improve monitoring and forecast models in the data-rich portions of food security early warning systems, such as those that rely on climate models and remote sensing. Where data are irregular and sources are varied, AI/ML should instead be used to improve the accessibility and timeliness of socioeconomic data collation. AI can augment food security analyst capabilities, but an analyst is needed to maintain clear systems of accountability and review for all issued forecasts…(More)”
Book by Jill Lepore: “Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of . . . the Artificial State,” writes Jill Lepore in this passionate account of how rule by machine has ravaged the world. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, which argued in 1951 that the machinery of modern life was reshaping the very fundamentals of human existence, Lepore, profoundly disturbed by the technology revolution and by the soulless inundation of artificial intelligence, unfurls a new history for our own twenty-first century.
Building on an essay in The New Yorker in 2024, Lepore’s clarion call traces our increasing dependence on and strangulation by data. Political campaigns, awash in an avalanche of fake bots, have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, while multinational media corporations dictate public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to a rapid end, replaced by billionaire technocrats reliant on autocracy and the tools of AI.
With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
Deliberately alarming, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, despite its abundance of dire facts, is not a funeral dirge; rather, it’s an inspiring wake-up call, written in Lepore’s typically elegiac prose, which demonstrates that nothing about the Artificial State was inevitable, for it is a “government without consent, even government without humans.” It can, Lepore asserts, be dismantled. Other heinous systems, like feudalism, fascism, and slavery, have also been dismantled, but disassembly requires identifying the parts, tracing the sources. It requires telling a new history. This is the purpose of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State…(More)”.
Article by Evan Osnos: “…For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, “Have you seen their car?” Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.
Lee, whose social-media posts have attracted more than fifty million followers, has a striking forecast for the two countries in which he has prospered. In his book “AI Superpowers,” published in 2018, he predicts a “new world order” with “waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China.” That kind of prophecy suits the official mood in Beijing, where Xi Jinping, the President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, calls technology the “main battlefield of international competition” and bluntly asserts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
In July, the Chinese firm Moonshot released an A.I. model that performed comparably to its American competitors, at a fraction of the cost. Microchip stocks plunged, on fears that China will dominate A.I., much as it now dominates hardware. China produces at least seventy per cent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells. It deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials. Its shipbuilding capacity is roughly two hundred times that of the U.S., and some observers in Washington worry that American stockpiles of munitions would not match China’s in a war over Taiwan…(More)”.
Paper by Siu-Ming Tam: “To meet growing demand for granular demographic and socioeconomic indicators under tighter budgets, national statistical offices must continually develop new methods. These include using big data, satellite imagery, and transactional sources to improve or redesign data collection. Artificial intelligence can support this work, but algorithms generated with AI should not be trusted for production without rigorous verification.
This paper focuses on two foundations of trust in the use of AI in official statistics: independent statistical verification before production use, and disciplined protection of respondent confidentiality during development and testing. The approach is illustrated through the author’s experience directing AI to construct and implement a Mini Max Hierarchical Bayes sampling algorithm. Applied to a synthetic labour force population, the method met all specified precision targets while reducing the required sample size by 80 percent, as confirmed by a Monte Carlo study with 1000 replications. Applied to 2021 Australian Census microdata, it achieved a 90 percent reduction while producing national point estimates accurate to well below 1 percent.
The paper concludes with a practical evaluation checklist aligned with the UN Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics and the HLG MOS Quality Framework for Statistical Algorithms…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst, Johannes Jutting and Roeland Beerten: “Official statistics face a fundamental paradox: data has never been more abundant, yet public trust in the institutions that produce it has never felt more precarious. This paper argues that the crisis is not primarily one of methodological failure or statistical illiteracy, but of representational legitimacy: aggregate indicators systematically fail to capture lived experience, and citizens increasingly do not recognize themselves in the numbers that purport to describe them. We situate this argument within a broader body of work on moving “from averages to agency”. We place lived experience at the analytical center, drawing on three intellectual traditions that official statistics has engaged less systematically: the mixed methods tradition in social research, the citizen science movement as recently codified in the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data, and the participation literature descending from Arnstein’s ladder. Drawing on emerging practices from statistical agencies across more than a dozen countries, we take stock of pathways through which official statistics are beginning to shift from passive measurement toward active participation. Because participation is not a single practice but a family of practices, we propose a matrix of engagement that crosses depth of participation with the stages of the data value chain, arguing for fit-for-purpose rather than maximal participation. We conclude with a research agenda organized around methodological integration, scalability, the ethics of social licence, and institutional transformation…(More)”.
Paper by Morten Ryen Loe, Subina Shrestha and Sophie-Marie Ertelt: “Visions of the smart city have become increasingly influential in guiding contemporary urban governance, particularly within the domain of mobility, where digital technologies and data-driven systems are expected to enable more sustainable and efficient transport systems. While existing research has highlighted the role of sociotechnical imaginaries in shaping smart city agendas, less attention has been given to how such visions are enacted and made consequential within everyday governance practices. This paper addresses this gap by examining how smart mobility initiatives derive value through their association with dominant imaginaries of smart urban futures. Empirically, the paper analyses four initiatives in Stavanger (Norway) and Gothenburg (Sweden). Drawing on literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and smart urbanism, we conceptualise smartwashing as the process through which initiatives selectively mobilise dominant visions of smartness to enhance legitimacy and political viability. Adopting a project-level perspective, we find that smart mobility projects derive value through interrelated processes of articulating projects through narratives of smartness, mobilising these narratives to advance projects within their political contexts, and aligning projects with existing policy goals and local governance settings, generating legitimacy and support even where their impacts remain partial or uncertain. We thus contend that, rather than deliberate misrepresentation, smartwashing captures the performative use of smartness as a governing frame through which projects are framed and promoted as meaningful and actionable, thereby embedding them within contemporary urban governance…(More)”.
Initiative by Tiago C. Peixoto, Luke Jordan and Manuel Ramos-Maqueda: “RADAR (Readiness for AI Discovery and Agentic Reach) measures how AI and agents can reach government services. Across 166 countries, it runs live model queries and autonomous agent attempts against real government services, scoring whether a service can be located, whether the information returned is country-specific and traceable to an official source, and whether an agent can get far enough to file an actual request. The results are somewhat counterintuitive: several governments that rank well on standard digital-government indices fare less well here, and many do better than those same rankings would suggest.
The paper closes on what it calls sovereign legibility, the deliberate work of making authoritative government content readable and actionable by AI systems. Many of the recommendations are low cost and no regret, and the last section sets out where the research goes next…(More)”.
Toolkit by the Canadian Institute for Health Information: “…houses an evolving collection of resources, documents and tools designed to support implementation of the Health Data Stewardship Framework. Complementing these tools is the Pan-Canadian Resource Inventory (XLSX), which brings together a curated collection of Canadian and international data stewardship resources that support pan-Canadian health data access, sharing and use.
Who is this implementation toolkit for?
This toolkit is designed for organizations, teams and individuals seeking to understand, assess and strengthen health data stewardship practices. It is for anyone involved in the capture, management, use and governance of health data.
You can use the resources within this toolkit to
- Support operationalization of the framework to improve data sharing, access and use
- Enable consistent monitoring of progress over time
- Learn from leading and emerging stewardship-related practices across health systems
Content will continue to expand as new tools are developed and as best practices evolve to continuously support you in your health data stewardship journey…(More)”