Paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst: “In this paper, I examine questions surrounding AI neutrality through the prism of existing literature and scholarship about mediation and media pluralism. Such traditions, I argue, provide a valuable theoretical framework for how we should approach the (likely) impending era of AI mediation. In particular, I suggest examining further the notion of algorithmic pluralism. Contrasting this notion to the dominant idea of algorithmic transparency, I seek to describe what algorithmic pluralism may be, and present both its opportunities and challenges. Implemented thoughtfully and responsibly, I argue, Algorithmic or AI pluralism has the potential to sustain the diversity, multiplicity, and inclusiveness that are so vital to democracy…(More)”.
‘Turning conflicts into co-creation’: Taiwan government harnesses digital policy for democracy
Article by Si Ying Thian: “Assistive intelligence and language models can help facilitate nuanced conversations because the human brain simply cannot process 1,000 different positions, said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of the Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA).
Tang was speaking at a webinar about policymaking in the digital age, hosted by LSE IDEAS, the think tank of the London School of Economics, on 1 December 2023.
She cited Talk to the City, a large language model that transforms transcripts from a variety of datasets into clusters of similar opinions, as an example of a technology that has helped increase collaboration and diversity without losing the ability to scale…
“The idea is to establish value-based, long-term collaborations based on the idea of public code. This is evident in many of our government websites, which very much look like the UK’s,” said Tang.
Public code is defined by Foundation of Public Code as an open-source software developed by public organisations, together with policy and guidance needed for collaboration and reuse…
The government’s commitment to open source is also evident in its rollout of the Taiwan Employment Gold Card, which integrates a flexible work permit, a residence visa for up to three years, and eligibility for national health insurance and income tax reduction.
According to Tang, the Taiwan government invites anyone with experience of eight years or more in contributing to open source or a Web3 publicly available ledger to enrol in the residency program…(More)”.
Want to know if your data are managed responsibly? Here are 15 questions to help you find out
Article by P. Alison Paprica et al: “As the volume and variety of data about people increases, so does the number of ideas about how data might be used. Studies show that many people want their data to be used for public benefit.
However, the research also shows that public support for use of data is conditional, and only given when risks such as those related to privacy, commercial exploitation and artificial intelligence misuse are addressed.
It takes a lot of work for organizations to establish data governance and management practices that mitigate risks while also encouraging beneficial uses of data. So much so, that it can be challenging for responsible organizations to communicate their data trustworthiness without providing an overwhelming amount of technical and legal details.
To address this challenge our team undertook a multiyear project to identify, refine and publish a short list of essential requirements for responsible data stewardship.
Our 15 minimum specification requirements (min specs) are based on a review of the scientific literature and the practices of 23 different data-focused organizations and initiatives.
As part of our project, we compiled over 70 public resources, including examples of organizations that address the full list of min specs: ICES, the Hartford Data Collaborative and the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training.
Our hope is that information related to the min specs will help organizations and data-sharing initiatives share best practices and learn from each other to improve their governance and management of data…(More)”.
Open data ecosystems: what models to co-create service innovations in smart cities?
Paper by Arthur Sarazin: “While smart cities are recently providing open data, how to organise the collective creation of data, knowledge and related products and services produced from this collective resource, still remains to be thought. This paper aims at gathering the literature review on open data ecosystems to tackle the following research question: what models can be imagined to stimulate the collective co-creation of services between smart cities’ stakeholders acting as providers and users of open data? Such issue is currently at stake in many municipalities such as Lisbon which decided to position itself as a platform (O’Reilly, 2010) in the local digital ecosystem. With the implementation of its City Operation Center (COI), Lisbon’s municipality provides an Information Infrastructure (Bowker et al., 2009) to many different types of actors such as telecom companies, municipalities, energy utilities or transport companies. Through this infrastructure, Lisbon encourages such actors to gather, integrate and release heterogeneous datasets and tries to orchestrate synergies among them so data-driven solution to urban problems can emerge (Carvalho and Vale, 2018). The remaining question being: what models for the municipalities such as Lisbon to lean on so as to drive this cutting-edge type of service innovation?…(More)”.
Gaza and the Future of Information Warfare
Article by P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking: “The Israel-Hamas war began in the early hours of Saturday, October 7, when Hamas militants and their affiliates stole over the Gazan-Israeli border by tunnel, truck, and hang glider, killed 1,200 people, and abducted over 200 more. Within minutes, graphic imagery and bombastic propaganda began to flood social media platforms. Each shocking video or post from the ground drew new pairs of eyes, sparked horrified reactions around the world, and created demand for more. A second front in the war had been opened online, transforming physical battles covering a few square miles into a globe-spanning information conflict.
In the days that followed, Israel launched its own bloody retaliation against Hamas; its bombardment of cities in the Gaza Strip killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in the first month. With a ground invasion in late October, Israeli forces began to take control of Gazan territory. The virtual battle lines, meanwhile, only became more firmly entrenched. Digital partisans clashed across Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, and other social media platforms, each side battling to be the only one heard and believed, unshakably committed to the righteousness of its own cause.
The physical and digital battlefields are now merged. In modern war, smartphones and cameras transmit accounts of nearly every military action across the global information space. The debates they spur, in turn, affect the real world. They shape public opinion, provide vast amounts of intelligence to actors around the world, and even influence diplomatic and military operational decisions at both the strategic and tactical levels. In our 2018 book, we dubbed this phenomenon “LikeWar,” defined as a political and military competition for command of attention. If cyberwar is the hacking of online networks, LikeWar is the hacking of the people on them, using their likes and shares to make a preferred narrative go viral…(More)”.
Generative AI and Policymaking for the New Frontier
Essay by Beth Noveck: “…Embracing the same responsible experimentation approach taken in Boston and New Jersey and expanding on the examples in those interim policies, this November the state of California issued an executive order and a lengthy but clearly written report, enumerating potential benefits from the use of generative AI.
These include:
- Sentiment Analysis — Using generative AI (GenAI) to analyze public feedback on state policies and services.
- Summarizing Meetings — GenAI can find the key topics, conclusions, action items and insights.
- Improving Benefits Uptake — AI can help identify public program participants who would benefit from additional outreach. GenAI can also identify groups that are disproportionately not accessing services.
- Translation — Generative AI can help translate government forms and websites into multiple languages.
- Accessibility — GenAI can be used to translate materials, especially educational materials into formats like audio, large print or Braille or to add captions.
- Cybersecurity —GenAI models can analyze data to detect and respond to cyber attacks faster and safeguard public infrastructure.
- Updating Legacy Technology — Because it can analyze and generate computer code, generative AI can accelerate the upgrading of old computer systems.
- Digitizing Services — GenAI can help speed up the creation of new technology. And with GenAI, anyone can create computer code, enabling even nonprogrammers to develop websites and software.
- Optimizing Routing — GenAI can analyze traffic patterns and ride requests to improve efficiency of state-managed transportation fleets, such as buses, waste collection trucks or maintenance vehicles.
- Improving Sustainability — GenAI can be applied to optimize resource allocation and enhance operational efficiency. GenAI simulation tools could, for example, “model the carbon footprint, water usage and other environmental impacts of major infrastructure projects.”
Because generative AI tools can both create and analyze content, these 10 are just a small subset of the many potential applications of generative AI in governing…(More)”.
Using Democratic Innovation to Rebuild Trust between Elected Officials and Citizens
Article by Nick Vlahos: “According to Pew Research, public trust in government is among the lowest it has been in 70 years of polling. Today, 25% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they trust the federal government just about always or most of the time, compared with 8% of Republicans and Republican leaners.
The dismal statistics we continue to see year in and year out are compounded by the fact that democracy is under threat around the world. In response, many are turning to democratic innovations. According to Oliver Escobar and Stephen Elstub, democratic innovations are “processes or institutions that are new to a policy issue, policy role, or level of governance, and developed to reimagine and deepen the role of citizens in governance processes by increasing opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence.”
Many of these innovations intend to redefine the role of citizens and carve out unique opportunities for them to engage with their peers, collectively problem-solving, and making decisions on important issues. However, there are increasing calls for re-envisioning the relationship between elected officials and citizens using deliberative and participatory processes.
One such approach is the deliberative town hall, implemented by the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability at Ohio State University. The model utilizes democratic innovation in the form of a deliberative mini-public within a single constituency, in relation to an elected official. Deliberative town halls bring together a cross-section of the community using stratified sampling, or civic lottery. The process further involves informed discussion on a topic with an elected official.
This approach has been commonly used with Members of Congress, but has recently been used in other Commonwealth countries, notably in Australia. What we know from this experience is that deliberative town halls can rebuild democratic relations by making interactions between elected officials and citizens more authentic, using reciprocal reason giving and sharing, and through active listening. In addition, ensuring that people with lived experience and scientific or topical expertise are present in conversations creates conditions for members of the public to better understand the nuances of an issue. Lastly, the Australian example highlights how having some type of impact over an outcome is highly prized by the public – they want to have their input factored into a decision, if not determining a decision altogether…(More)”.
Governing the economics of the common good
Paper by Mariana Mazzucato: “To meet today’s grand challenges, economics requires an understanding of how common objectives may be collaboratively set and met. Tied to the assumption that the state can, at best, fix market failures and is always at risk of ‘capture’, economic theory has been unable to offer such a framework. To move beyond such limiting assumptions, the paper provides a renewed conception of the common good, going beyond the classic public good and commons approach, as a way of steering and shaping (rather than just fixing) the economy towards collective goals…(More)”.
Urban Artificial Intelligence: From Real-world Observations to a Paradigm-Shifting Concept
Blog by Hubert Beroche: “Cities are facing unprecedented challenges. The figures are well known: while occupying only 2% of the earth’s surface, urban settlements host more than 50% of the global population and are responsible for 70% of greenhouse emissions. While concentrating most capital and human wealth, they are also places of systemic inequalities (Nelson, 2023), exacerbating and materializing social imbalances. In the meantime, cities have fewer and fewer resources to face those tensions. Increasing environmental constraints, combined with shrinking public budgets, are putting pressure on cities’ capacities. More than ever, urban stakeholders have to do more with less.
In this context, Artificial Intelligence has usually been seen as a much-welcomed technology. This technology can be defined as machines’ ability to perform cognitive functions, mainly through learning algorithms since 2012. First embedded in heavy top-down Smart City projects, AI applications in cities have gradually proliferated under the impetus of various stakeholders. Today’s cities are home to numerous AIs, owned and used by multiple stakeholders to serve different, sometimes divergent, interests.
When Science Meets Power
Book by Geoff Mulgan: “Science and politics have collaborated throughout human history, and science is repeatedly invoked today in political debates, from pandemic management to climate change. But the relationship between the two is muddled and muddied.
Leading policy analyst Geoff Mulgan here calls attention to the growing frictions caused by the expanding authority of science, which sometimes helps politics but often challenges it.
He dissects the complex history of states’ use of science for conquest, glory and economic growth and shows the challenges of governing risk – from nuclear weapons to genetic modification, artificial intelligence to synthetic biology. He shows why the governance of science has become one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century, ever more prominent in daily politics and policy.
Whereas science is ordered around what we know and what is, politics engages what we feel and what matters. How can we reconcile the two, so that crucial decisions are both well informed and legitimate?
The book proposes new ways to organize democracy and government, both within nations and at a global scale, to better shape science and technology so that we can reap more of the benefits and fewer of the harms…(More)”.