Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri: “Jürgen Habermas’ enduring work began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London. His deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one.

Georgian London had around 3,000 coffee houses. For a penny a cup, a merchant, a shopkeeper or a gentleman could sit down together, read the newspapers spread before them, and argue about the affairs of Parliament, the conduct of the war against France, or the merits of the latest edition of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. The most powerful account of this world, and of its destruction, was perhaps unexpectedly written not by an English historian but by a German philosopher born into a provincial middle-class household in North Rhine-Westphalia, who died on Saturday in the Bavarian town of Starnberg at the age of 96.

Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929 into the kind of provincial, educated German household that had neither resisted nor much assisted Hitler’s regime. At 15 he was sent to the Western Front in the last chaotic months of the war. What followed shaped his cultural and political outlook: the Nuremberg revelations, the slow reckoning with what had been done in Germany’s name against the Jews, and a conviction, arrived at young and never abandoned, that the liberal constitutional state as it had developed in the English-speaking world represented a genuine civilisational achievement. Years later he described himself, with characteristic precision, as a ‘product of re-education’…(More)”.

Article by Arthur Mensch: “Europe is a land of creators. The continent has nurtured ideas that have enriched, and continue to enrich, the world’s intellectual and creative landscape. Its diverse and multilingual heritage remains one of its greatest strengths, central not only to its identity and soft power but also to its economic vitality.

All this is at risk as AI reshapes the global knowledge economy.

Major AI companies in the US and China are developing their models under permissive or non-existent copyright rules, training them domestically on vast amounts of content — including from European sources.

European AI developers, by contrast, operate in a fragmented legal environment that places them at a competitive disadvantage. The current opt-out framework, designed to enable rights holders to protect their content and prevent AI companies from using it for training if they say so, has proven unworkable in practice. Copyrighted works continue to spread uncontrollably online, while the legal mechanisms designed to protect them remain patchy, inconsistently applied and overly complex.

The result is a framework that satisfies no one. Rights holders correctly fear for their livelihoods yet see no clear path to protection. AI developers face legal uncertainty that hampers investment and growth.

Europe needs to explore a new approach.

At Mistral, we are proposing a revenue-based levy that would be applied to all commercial providers placing AI models on the market or putting them into service in Europe, reflecting their use of content publicly available online…(More)”.

Article by Barrett and Greene: “Since GenAI first appeared on the scene in late 2022, both benefits and hazards have been chronicled in multiple places, including this website. Advantages of AI play out on a daily basis providing cities and counties quicker results, increased staff efficiency, and improved government-resident communications. 

But as generative AI use took off, media reports surfaced of fabrications delivered in response to prompts (known as hallucinations) and factual errors that were embarrassing and sometimes costly for governments and their vendors.  

“If you don’t have a strategy or plan in place for how you deal with AI hazards, you’re going to get in trouble very fast,” says Brian Funderburk, an advocate for the responsible use of AI in government, and a retired city manager in Texas with 40 years of experience in local government.

The litany of problematic uses of AI seems to grow every day as its use expands. Just for starters, there have been fictitious precedents cited in legal cases. Chatbot errors have also surfaced with some frequency, notably in the much-heralded chatbot designed for businesses developed by New York City in the fall of 2023, that was roundly criticized the following spring for giving business callers incorrect information and sometimes advising them to engage in illegal behavior. 

Multiple companies have had to deal with the consequences of AI mistakes, including Deloitte, which agreed to refund the equivalent of $290,000 in U.S. dollars to the Australian government for a report “that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors,” according to an AP News report. 

Although hallucinations that AI can conjure have diminished to some extent, the continuing threat of errors requires extensive double-checking and triple-checking by humans that bear responsibility for what’s produced. “It will be a while before we can trust AI unconditionally,” says Funderburk who is currently Vice President and AI Safety Officer at Civic Marketplace…(More)”.

Book edited by Crystal Chokshi and Robin Mansell: “This book is about words that fool us into thinking that the digital technologies we use every day are beautiful, benign, and consequence-free. The collection shows how metaphors used by Big Tech to promote digital technologies are reductive or misleading. With a commitment to social justice, the contributors rename digital technologies in order to subvert Big Tech’s branding. Each chapter discusses a specific technology, rechristening it in a way that points explicitly to the social and political harms it is associated with. The alternative vocabularies that are proposed draw attention to what these technologies bring about, providing a means of resisting Silicon Valley’s claims about what people and organisations should buy and experience…(More)”.

Blog by Adam Zable and Stefaan Verhulst: “To monitor open data policies across the world, we developed the Open Data Policy Lab Policy Repository. This quarter, we added 11 new policy developments within and across Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. They illustrate the range of mechanisms through which governments and international institutions are increasingly structuring access to data. Five approaches emerge:

• mandating the release and reuse of public data; 
• authorizing controlled sharing of government-held datasets; 
• enabling structured access to privately controlled or platform-held data; 
• governing cross-border data flows through trade frameworks, certification regimes, and bilateral agreements; and 
• restructuring the legal architecture that governs data access frameworks themselves.

In the below, we provide further detail…(More)”.

Article by Nana Kajaia and Tuntufye Ntaukira: “Digital wallets are becoming commonplace, often used for digitally storing payment cards instead of physical cards or cash. But beyond payments, as digital public goods with the right safeguards, digital wallets can enable individuals to reliably prove their eligibility for social protection benefits in times of need, securely share health records during an emergency, or promptly provide a certified document needed for a prospective employer.  

Whenever these digital forms are recognized and integrated across systems, they can significantly increase access to public and private services, enhancing people’s lives and livelihoods. This was the theme of UNDP’s recent Digital X 3.0 knowledge-exchange webinar on strengthening human security through digital public goods, organized in partnership with the Government of Japan. 

The discussions underscored how digital wallets as a core part of a country’s digital public infrastructure can unlock new opportunities for strengthening human security, across services, institutions and borders.  

Malawi and Argentina: Overcoming barriers to accessing critical services  

In many countries, people still tend to carry around printouts of essential documents and stand in queues for hours to confirm information that oftentimes already exists digitally. 

• Imagine a farmer in Malawi having to repeatedly submit physical documentation to show proof of land ownership to pay land taxes, because the national identity, agricultural, and financial systems in his country are not integrated. 
• Imagine a pregnant woman in Argentina trying to access maternal health services in a local clinic, but she is unable to provide a physical identification card that matches the name on her insurance card during an emergency visit…(More)”.

Article by Daniel Sachs: “Most commentaries on democratic erosion focus on the supply side of the equation – the strongmen and new doctrines, blocs, or geopolitical arrangements disrupting domestic politics and the rules-based international order. While important, this perspective ignores the demand that is driving current political trends.

…Proliferating wars and shaky alliances are hallmarks of today’s brutal new political reality, one that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. But the geopolitical rupture currently underway is no accident of history, nor is it simply the result of strongmen, weak institutions, or a sudden loss of restraint. It mirrors something more fundamental: the social soil of our societies. Politics does not occur in a vacuum. It grows out of lived experience, reflecting whether people feel secure, respected, and optimistic about a shared future…(More)”.

Article by byEdoardo Alberto Vigano and Paolo Gambacciani: “…To understand Italy’s approach to this issue, it is useful to look beyond the national context. So far, the adoption of AI in parliaments has been concentrated mainly in highly developed countries and has not been accompanied by a shared regulatory framework. The result is a fragmented landscape in which technological development and regulation are largely shaped by individual parliaments or EU institutions.

In practice, each parliament is adopting one or more AI tools according to internal priorities, with potentially significant implications for institutional organisation and the conduct of democratic deliberation.

Some applications are designed for internal use, supporting parliamentary staff, MPs and legislative committees. Others are outward-facing, aiming to enhance transparency, accessibility and citizen participation.

Some tools affect the legislative process directly; others primarily reshape the relationship between parliament and citizens. Current examples range from AI-assisted transcription and automated classification of debates and parliamentary activities, to automated sequencing of votes on amendments, drafting support and admissibility checks, natural-language search of parliamentary documents, and tools intended to synthesise public sentiment around bills under discussion. These examples suggest that AI is not merely a neutral administrative upgrade. It can reshape parliamentary power and practice, particularly when adoption concentrates on a specific class of tools.

Strategic choices in AI adoption

International cases illustrate how AI deployment may reflect strategic choices about parliament’s institutional role.

The Chilean Congress, for example, through its Caminar platform, has prioritised simplifying legislative activity by supporting the drafting of bills and amendments. By contrast, Brazil’s experience with initiatives such as Brasil Participativo has focused on strengthening popular participation, developing participatory AI solutions.

It is therefore unsurprising that the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which represents parliaments worldwide, has recently stressed that before adopting AI tools, parliaments should clarify the institutional role they intend to play in the future, particularly in relation to deliberation and the balance between parliament and government.

The IPU outlines three possible trajectories for representative assemblies:

• AI-Augmented Assembly: AI enhances human judgement while democratic primacy is preserved; AI acts as a “co-pilot” rather than replacing human decision-making.
• Data-Driven Legislature: AI becomes central to decision-making, with political deliberation increasingly displaced by predominantly evidence-based processes.
• Shadow Legislature: AI capabilities are concentrated within the executive branch, leaving parliaments structurally disadvantaged in managing emergencies, analysing complex dossiers and engaging citizens…(More)”.

Chapter by Anna De Liddo, Lucas Anastasiou, and Simon Buckingham Shum: “…introduces the concept of Collective Intelligence for Deliberative Democracy (CI4DD). We propose that the use of computational tools, specifically artificial intelligence to advance deliberative democracy, is an instantiation of a broader class of human-computer system designed to augment collective intelligence. Further, we argue for a fundamentally human-centred design approach to orchestrate how stakeholders can contribute meaningfully to shaping the artifacts and processes needed to create trustworthy DD processes. We first contextualise the key concepts of CI and the role of AI within it. We then detail our co-design methodology for identifying key challenges, refining user scenarios, and deriving technical implications. Two exemplar cases illustrate how user requirements from civic organisations were implemented with AI support and piloted in authentic contexts…(More)”.

Book by Nasim Afsar: “It was built to react and manage illness only after symptoms occur and it’s not even succeeding at that: chronic disease rates climb relentlessly, outcomes worsen year after year, and health and care grow more expensive. Worse still, the person who should be at the center is treated as a vessel for their illness, only valued for the revenue they generate.

Meanwhile, healthcare systems, payers, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, and technology firms compete fiercely for their growth and survival. But no one is competing to make you healthier. We’ve reached a breaking point where the system doesn’t just fail; it actively harms people through preventable suffering and bankrupts families through inexcusable waste.

Enter Intelligent Health. A fundamental reimagining of health and care around a different center of gravity: you. It begins by unifying all your health and care data—clinical, behavioral, environmental, genetic—to see the complete picture of what shapes your health. It applies artificial intelligence to transform that data into actionable insight for today and predictive foresight about the future, catching problems before they cascade into crises. Most radically, it aligns the entire ecosystem of health and care around you.

Today, consumer health solutions multiply while outcomes stagnate. Costs spiral while access shrinks. Technology advances while coordination collapses. Intelligent Health offers what incremental reform cannot: a fundamental reimagining of health and care to create a system that is more human, more intelligent, and built to advance health…(More)”