Book by David Wiles: “Democracy… is actually a form of theatre. In making his case, the author deftly investigates orators at the foundational moments of ancient and modern democracy, demonstrating how their performative skills were used to try to create a better world. People often complain about demagogues, or wish that politicians might be more sincere. But to do good, politicians (paradoxically) must be hypocrites – or actors. Moving from Athens to Indian independence via three great revolutions – in Puritan England, republican France and liberal America – the book opens up larger questions about the nature of democracy. When in the classical past Plato condemned rhetoric, the only alternative he could offer was authoritarianism. Wiles’ bold historical study has profound implications for our present: calls for personal authenticity, he suggests, are not an effective way to counter the rise of populism…(More)”
More-than-human governance experiments in Europe
Paper by Claudia Chwalisz & Lucy Reid: “There is a growing network of people and places exploring and practising how governance and policy design can draw on more-than-human intelligences.
‘More-than-human’ was initially coined by David Abram in his 1997 book The Spell of the Sensuous. The term refers to the animate earth and the impossibility of separating our human- ness from our relationship with it. Our exploration related to governance has been around how we might meaningfully consider our relationship with the living world when taking decisions.
We have undertaken a short exploratory research project to learn who is conducting new governance experiments in Europe to begin to map the field, learn from best practices, and share these findings…
There were three main types of approaches to applying the idea of more-than-human governance in practice, sometimes with an overlap:
- Rights-based;
- Representation-focused, and
- Artistic.
We identified four key groups we felt were missing from our initial research and discussions:
- Indigenous voices;
- More non-specialists and artists;
- A few critical voices, and
- People using technology in novel ways that reshape our relationship with the living world…(More)”
The history of AI and power in government
Book chapter by Shirley Kempeneer: “…begins by examining the simultaneous development of statistics and the state. Drawing on the works of notable scholars like Alain Desrosières, Theodore Porter, James Scott, and Michel Foucault, the chapter explores measurement as a product of modernity. It discusses the politics and power of (large) numbers, through their ability to make societies legible and controllable, also in the context of colonialism. The chapter then discusses the shift from data to big data and how AI and the state, just like statistics and the state, are mutually constitutive. It zooms in on shifting power relations, discussing the militarization of society, the outsourcing of the state to tech contractors, the exploitation of human bodies under the guise of ‘automation’, and the oppression of vulnerable citizens. Where news media often focus on the power of AI, that is supposedly escaping our control, this chapter relocates power in AI-systems, building on the work of Kate Crawford, Bruno Latour, and Emily Bender…(More)”
The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia
Paper by Creston Brooks, Samuel Eggert, and Denis Peskoff: “The rise of AI-generated content in popular information sources raises significant concerns about accountability, accuracy, and bias amplification. Beyond directly impacting consumers, the widespread presence of this content poses questions for the long-term viability of training language models on vast internet sweeps. We use GPTZero, a proprietary AI detector, and Binoculars, an open-source alternative, to establish lower bounds on the presence of AI-generated content in recently created Wikipedia pages. Both detectors reveal a marked increase in AI-generated content in recent pages compared to those from before the release of GPT-3.5. With thresholds calibrated to achieve a 1% false positive rate on pre-GPT-3.5 articles, detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated, with lower percentages for German, French, and Italian articles. Flagged Wikipedia articles are typically of lower quality and are often self-promotional or partial towards a specific viewpoint on controversial topics…(More)”
AI and Data Science for Public Policy
Introduction to Special Issue by Kenneth Benoit: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science are reshaping public policy by enabling more data-driven, predictive, and responsive governance, while at the same time producing profound changes in knowledge production and education in the social and policy sciences. These advancements come with ethical and epistemological challenges surrounding issues of bias, transparency, privacy, and accountability. This special issue explores the opportunities and risks of integrating AI into public policy, offering theoretical frameworks and empirical analyses to help policymakers navigate these complexities. The contributions explore how AI can enhance decision-making in areas such as healthcare, justice, and public services, while emphasising the need for fairness, human judgment, and democratic accountability. The issue provides a roadmap for harnessing AI’s potential responsibly, ensuring it serves the public good and upholds democratic values…(More)”.
Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections
Book by Alexander Guerrero: “Democracy is in trouble. The system isn’t working. Inequality increases, many can barely get by, the elite control our political institutions. The earth, our only home, gets warmer year by year. We are deeply divided, unable to work together to address the problems we face. What if elections are the problem?
Lottocracy makes the case that electoral representative democracy—although the best form of government that has been tried—runs into deep problems in the modern world.
But it is not a message of despair. To the contrary. Lottocracy sets out a detailed vision of a new kind of democracy, as system that uses lotteries, rather than elections, to select our political representatives.
Perhaps we can use this wild ancient idea to build a new, better democracy for the 21st century and beyond…(More)”.
Conversational Swarms of Humans and AI Agents enable Hybrid Collaborative Decision-making
Paper by Louis Rosenberg et al: “Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is an AI-powered communication and collaboration technology that allows large, networked groups (of potentially unlimited size) to hold thoughtful conversational deliberations in real-time. Inspired by the efficient decision-making dynamics of fish schools, CSI divides a human population into a set of small subgroups connected by AI agents. This enables the full group to hold a unified conversation. In this study, groups of 25 participants were tasked with selecting a roster of players in a real Fantasy Baseball contest. A total of 10 trials were run using CSI. In half the trials, each subgroup was augmented with a fact-providing AI agent referred to herein as an Infobot. The Infobot was loaded with a wide range of MLB statistics. The human participants could query the Infobot the same way they would query other persons in their subgroup. Results show that when using CSI, the 25-person groups outperformed 72% of individually surveyed participants and showed significant intelligence amplification versus the mean score (p=0.016). The CSI-enabled groups also significantly outperformed the most popular picks across the collected surveys for each daily contest (p<0.001). The CSI sessions that used Infobots scored slightly higher than those that did not, but it was not statistically significant in this study. That said, 85% of participants agreed with the statement ‘Our decisions were stronger because of information provided by the Infobot’ and only 4% disagreed. In addition, deliberations that used Infobots showed significantly less variance (p=0.039) in conversational content across members. This suggests that Infobots promoted more balanced discussions in which fewer members dominated the dialog. This may be because the infobot enabled participants to confidently express opinions with the support of factual data…(More)”.
Enabling Digital Innovation in Government
OECD Report: “…presents the OECD’s definition of GovTech (Chapter 2) and sets out the GovTech Policy Framework (Chapter 3). The framework is designed to guide governments on how to establish the conditions for successful, sustainable, and effective GovTech.
The framework consists of two parts: the GovTech Building Blocks and the GovTech Enablers. The building blocks (Chapter 3) represent the foundations at the micro-level needed to establish impactful GovTech practices within public sectors by introducing more agile practices, mitigating risks, and building meaningful collaboration with the GovTech ecosystem. These building blocks include:
- Mature digital government infrastructure: including the necessary technology, infrastructure, tools, and data governance to enable both GovTech collaborations and the digital solutions they develop.
- Capacities for collaboration and experimentation: within the public sector, including the digital skills and multidisciplinary teams; agile processes, tools, and methodologies; and a culture that encourages experimentation and accepts failure.
- Resources and implementation support: considering how to make funding available, how to evolve procurement approaches, and how to scale successful pilots across organisations and internationally.
- Availability and maturity of GovTech partners: including acceleration programmes to support start-ups growth by facilitating access to capital, the scaling up of solutions, and minimising barriers to access procurement opportunities.
At the macro-level, the enablers (Chapter 4) instead create an environment that fosters the development of GovTech and facilitates good practices. This is done at the:
- Strategic layer: where governments could use GovTech strategies and champions in senior leadership positions to mobilise support and set a clear direction for GovTech.
- Institutional layer: where governments could seek collaboration and knowledge-sharing across institutions at the national, regional, or policy levels.
- Network layer: where both governments and GovTech actors should seek to mobilise the network collectively to strengthen the GovTech practice and garner broader support from communities…(More)”
Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation
Essay by Lily L. Tsai and Alex Pentland: “Human society developed when most collective decision-making was limited to small, geographically concentrated groups such as tribes or extended family groups. Discussions about community issues could take place among small numbers of people with similar concerns. As coordination across larger distances evolved, the costs of travel required representatives from each clan or smaller group to participate in deliberations and decision-making involving multiple local communities. Divergence in the interests of representatives and their constituents opened up opportunities for corruption and elite capture.
Technologies now enable very large numbers of people to communicate, coordinate, and make collective decisions on the same platform. We have new opportunities for digitally enabled civic participation and direct democracy that scale for both the smallest and largest groups of people. Quantitative experiments, sometimes including tens of millions of individuals, have examined inclusiveness and efficiency in decision-making via digital networks. Their findings suggest that large networks of nonexperts can make practical, productive decisions and engage in collective action under certain (1) conditions. (2) These conditions include shared knowledge among individuals and communities with similar concerns, and information about their recent actions and outcomes…(More)”
Design Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation
Book by Ilaria Mariani et al: “This open access book examines how the adoption of Design Thinking (DT) can support public organisations in overcoming some of the current barriers in e-participation. Scholars have discussed the adoption of technology to strengthen public engagement through e-participation, streamline and enhance the relationship between government and society, and improve accessibility and effectiveness. However, barriers persist, necessitating further research in this area. By analysing e-participation barriers emerging from the literature and aligning them with notions in the DT literature, this book identifies five core DT practices to enhance e-participation: (i) Meaning creation and sense-making, (ii) Publics formation, (iii) Co-production, (iv) Experimentation and prototyping, and (v) Changing organisational culture. As a result, this book provides insights into enhancing tech-aided public engagement and promoting inclusivity for translating citizen input into tangible service implementations. The book triangulates qualitative analysis of relevant literature in the fields of e-participation and DT with knowledge from European projects experimenting with public participation activities implying experimentation with digital tools. This research aims to bridge the gap between theoretical frameworks and practical application, ultimately contributing to more effective e-participation and digital public services…(More)”.