NegotiateAI 


About: “The NegotiateAI app is designed to streamline access to critical information on the UN Plastic Treaty Negotiations to develop a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including the marine environment. It offers a comprehensive, centralized database of documents submitted by member countries available here, along with an extensive collection of supporting resources, including reports, research papers, and policy briefs. You can find more information about the NegotiateAI project on our website…The Interactive Treaty Assistant simplifies the search and analysis of documents by INC members, enabling negotiators and other interested parties to quickly pinpoint crucial information. With an intuitive interface, The Interactive Treaty Assistant supports treaty-specific queries and provides direct links to relevant documents for deeper research…(More)”.

What AI Can’t Do for Democracy


Essay by Daniel Berliner: “In short, there is increasing optimism among both theorists and practitioners over the potential for technology-enabled civic engagement to rejuvenate or deepen democracy. Is this optimism justified?

The answer depends on how we think about what civic engagement can do. Political representatives are often unresponsive to the preferences of ordinary people. Their misperceptions of public needs and preferences are partly to blame, but the sources of democratic dysfunction are much deeper and more structural than information alone. Working to ensure many more “citizens’ voices are truly heard” will thus do little to improve government responsiveness in contexts where the distribution of power means that policymakers have no incentive to do what citizens say. And as some critics have argued, it can even distract from recognizing and remedying other problems, creating a veneer of legitimacy—what health policy expert Sherry Arnstein once famously derided as mere “window dressing.”

Still, there are plenty of cases where contributions from citizens can highlight new problems that need addressingnew perspectives by which issues are understood, and new ideas for solving public problems—from administrative agencies seeking public input to city governments seeking to resolve resident complaints and citizens’ assemblies deliberating on climate policy. But even in these and other contexts, there is reason to doubt AI’s usefulness across the board. The possibilities of AI for civic engagement depend crucially on what exactly it is that policymakers want to learn from the public. For some types of learning, applications of AI can make major contributions to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of information processing. For others, there is no getting around the fundamental needs for human attention and context-specific knowledge in order to adequately make sense of public voices. We need to better understand these differences to avoid wasting resources on tools that might not deliver useful information…(More)”.

People-centred and participatory policymaking


Blog by the UK Policy Lab: “…Different policies can play out in radically different ways depending on circumstance and place. Accordingly it is important for policy professionals to have access to a diverse suite of people-centred methods, from gentle and compassionate techniques that increase understanding with small groups of people to higher-profile, larger-scale engagements. The image below shows a spectrum of people-centred and participatory methods that can be used in policy, ranging from light-touch involvement (e.g. consultation), to structured deliberation (e.g. citizens’ assemblies) and deeper collaboration and empowerment (e.g. participatory budgeting). This spectrum of participation is speculatively mapped against stages of the policy cycle…(More)”.

From Digital Sovereignty to Digital Agency


Article by Akash Kapur: “In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued variants of digital sovereignty to regulate and control the global digital ecosystem. The pursuit of AI sovereignty represents the latest iteration in this quest. 

Digital sovereignty may offer certain benefits, but it also poses undeniable risks, including the possibility of undermining the very goals of autonomy and self-reliance that nations are seeking. These risks are particularly pronounced for smaller nations with less capacity, which might do better in a revamped, more inclusive, multistakeholder system of digital governance. 

Organizing digital governance around agency rather than sovereignty offers the possibility of such a system. Rather than reinforce the primacy of nations, digital agency asserts the rights, priorities, and needs not only of sovereign governments but also of the constituent parts—the communities and individuals—they purport to represent.

Three cross-cutting principles underlie the concept of digital agency: recognizing stakeholder multiplicity, enhancing the latent possibilities of technology, and promoting collaboration. These principles lead to three action-areas that offer a guide for digital policymakers: reinventing institutions, enabling edge technologies, and building human capacity to ensure technical capacity…(More)”.

Moral Imagination for Engineering Teams: The Technomoral Scenario


Paper by Geoff Keeling et al: “Moral imagination” is the capacity to register that one’s perspective on a decision-making situation is limited, and to imagine alternative perspectives that reveal new considerations or approaches. We have developed a Moral Imagination approach that aims to drive a culture of responsible innovation, ethical awareness, deliberation, decision-making, and commitment in organizations developing new technologies. We here present a case study that illustrates one key aspect of our approach – the technomoral scenario – as we have applied it in our work with product and engineering teams. Technomoral scenarios are fictional narratives that raise ethical issues surrounding the interaction between emerging technologies and society. Through facilitated roleplaying and discussion, participants are prompted to examine their own intentions, articulate justifications for actions, and consider the impact of decisions on various stakeholders. This process helps developers to reenvision their choices and responsibilities, ultimately contributing to a culture of responsible innovation…(More)”.

The Motivational State: A strengths-based approach to improving public sector productivity


Paper by Alex Fox and Chris Fox: “…argues that traditional approaches to improving public sector productivity, such as adopting private sector practices, technology-driven reforms, and tighter management, have failed to address the complex and evolving needs of public service users. It proposes a shift towards a strengths-based, person-led model, where public services are co-produced with individuals, families, and communities…(More)”.

The Age of the Average


Article by Olivier Zunz: “The age of the average emerged from the engineering of high mass consumption during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, when tinkerers in industry joined forces with scientists to develop new products and markets. The division of labor between them became irrelevant as industrial innovation rested on advances in organic chemistry, the physics of electricity, and thermodynamics. Working together, these industrial engineers and managers created the modern mass market that penetrated all segments of society from the middle out. Thus, in the heyday of the Gilded Age, at the height of the inequality pitting robber barons against the “common man,” was born, unannounced but increasingly present, the “average American.” It is in searching for the average consumer that American business managers at the time drew a composite portrait of an imagined individual. Here was a person nobody ever met or knew, merely a statistical conceit, who nonetheless felt real.

This new character was not uniquely American. Forces at work in America were also operative in Europe, albeit to a lesser degree. Thus, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, who died in 1942, reflected on the average man in his unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. In the middle of his narrative, Musil paused for a moment to give a definition of the word average: “What each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average [is] a ‘something,’ but nobody knows exactly what…. the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless” but “[depending] on [the] law of large numbers.” This, I think, is a powerful definition of the American social norm in the “age of the average”: a meaningless something made real, or seemingly real, by virtue of its repetition. Economists called this average person the “representative individual” in their models of the market. Their complex simplification became an agreed-upon norm, at once a measure of performance and an attainable goal. It was not intended to suggest that all people are alike. As William James once approvingly quoted an acquaintance of his, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” And that remained true in the age of the average…(More)”

Mini-publics and the public: challenges and opportunities


Conversation between Sarah Castell and Stephen Elstub: “…there’s a real problem here: the public are only going to get to know about a mini-public if it gets media coverage, but the media will only cover it if it makes an impact. But it’s more likely to make an impact if the public are aware of it. That’s a tension that mini-publics need to overcome, because it’s important that they reach out to the public. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how inclusive the recruitment is and how well it’s done. It doesn’t matter how well designed the process is. It is still a small number of people involved, so we want mini-publics to be able to influence public opinion and stimulate public debate. And if they can do that, then it’s more likely to affect elite opinion and debate as well, and possibly policy.

One more thing is that, people in power aren’t in the habit of sharing power. And that’s why it’s very difficult. I think the politicians are mainly motivated around this because they hope it’s going to look good to the electorate and get them some votes, but they are also worried about low levels of trust in society and what the ramifications of that might be. But in general, people in power don’t give it away very easily…

Part of the problem is that a lot of the research around public views on deliberative processes was done through experiments. It is useful, but it doesn’t quite tell us what will happen when mini-publics are communicated to the public in the messy real public sphere. Previously, there just weren’t that many well-known cases that we could actually do field research on. But that is starting to change.

There’s also more interdisciplinary work needed in this area. We need to improve how communication strategies around citizens’ assembly are done – there must be work that’s relevant in political communication studies and other fields who have this kind of insight…(More)”.

The Death of “Deliverism”


Article by Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams and Harry Hanbury: “How could it be that the largest-ever recorded drop in childhood poverty had next to no political resonance?

One of us became intrigued by this question when he walked into a graduate class one evening in 2021 and received unexpected and bracing lessons about the limits of progressive economic policy from his students.

Deepak had worked on various efforts to secure expanded income support for a long time—and was part of a successful push over two decades earlier to increase the child tax credit, a rare win under the George W. Bush presidency. His students were mostly working-class adults of color with full-time jobs, and many were parents. Knowing that the newly expanded child tax credit would be particularly helpful to his students, he entered the class elated. The money had started to hit people’s bank accounts, and he was eager to hear about how the extra income would improve their lives. He asked how many of them had received the check. More than half raised their hands. Then he asked those students whether they were happy about it. Not one hand went up.

Baffled, Deepak asked why. One student gave voice to the vibe, asking, “What’s the catch?” As the class unfolded, students shared that they had not experienced government as a benevolent force. They assumed that the money would be recaptured later with penalties. It was, surely, a trap. And of course, in light of centuries of exploitation and deceit—in criminal justice, housing, and safety net systems—working-class people of color are not wrong to mistrust government bureaucracies and institutions. The real passion in the class that night, and many nights, was about crime and what it was like to take the subway at night after class. These students were overwhelmingly progressive on economic and social issues, but many of their everyday concerns were spoken to by the right, not the left.

The American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansion of the child tax credit lifted more than 2 million children out of poverty, resulting in an astounding 46 percent reduction in child poverty. Yet the policy’s lapse sparked almost no political response, either from its champions or its beneficiaries. Democrats hardly campaigned on the remarkable achievement they had just delivered, and the millions of parents impacted by the policy did not seem to feel that it made much difference in their day-to-day lives. Even those who experienced the greatest benefit from the expanded child tax credit appeared unmoved by the policy. In fact, during the same time span in which monthly deposits landed in beneficiaries’ bank accounts, the percentage of Black voters—a group that especially benefited from the policy—who said their lives had improved under the Biden Administration actually declined…(More)”.

Ignorance: A Global History


Book by Peter Burke: “Throughout history, every age has thought of itself as more knowledgeable than the last. Renaissance humanists viewed the Middle Ages as an era of darkness, Enlightenment thinkers tried to sweep superstition away with reason, the modern welfare state sought to slay the “giant” of ignorance, and in today’s hyperconnected world seemingly limitless information is available on demand. But what about the knowledge lost over the centuries? Are we really any less ignorant than our ancestors?
 
In this highly original account, Peter Burke examines the long history of humanity’s ignorance across religion and science, war and politics, business and catastrophes. Burke reveals remarkable stories of the many forms of ignorance—genuine or feigned, conscious and unconscious—from the willful politicians who redrew Europe’s borders in 1919 to the politics of whistleblowing and climate change denial. The result is a lively exploration of human knowledge across the ages, and the importance of recognizing its limits…(More)”.