Deliberation is no silver bullet for the ‘problem’ of populism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kristof Jacobs: “Populists are not satisfied with the way democracy works nowadays. They do not reject liberal democracy outright, but want it to change. Indeed, they feel the political elite is unresponsive. Not surprisingly, then, populist parties thrive in settings where there is widespread feeling that politicians do not listen to the people.

What if… decision-makers gave citizens a voice in the decision-making process? In fact, this is happening across the globe. Democratic innovations, that is: decision-making processes that aim to deepen citizens’ participation and engagement in political decision-making, are ever more popular. They come in many shapes and forms, such as referendums, deliberative mini-publics or participatory budgeting. Deliberative democratic innovations in particular are popular, as is evidenced by the many nation-level citizens’ assemblies on climate change. We have seen such assemblies not only in France, but also in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Spain and Austria.

Several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that deliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism

Scholars of deliberation are optimistic about the potential of such deliberative events. In one often-cited piece in Science, several prominent scholars of deliberation contend that ‘[d]eliberation promotes considered judgment and counteracts populism’.

But is that optimism warranted? What does the available empirical research tell us? To examine this, one must distinguish between populist citizens and populist parties…(More)”.

Towards a Considered Use of AI Technologies in Government 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute on Governance and Think Digital: “… undertook a case study-based research project, where 24 examples of AI technology projects and governance frameworks across a dozen jurisdictions were scanned. The purpose of this report is to provide policymakers and practitioners in government with an overview of controversial deployments of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the public sector, and to highlight some of the approaches being taken to govern the responsible use of these technologies in government. 

Two environmental scans make up the majority of the report. The first scan presents relevant use cases of public sector applications of AI technologies and automation, with special attention given to controversial projects and program/policy failures. The second scan surveys existing governance frameworks employed by international organizations and governments around the world. Each scan is then analyzed to determine common themes across use cases and governance frameworks respectively. The final section of the report provides risk considerations related to the use of AI by public sector institutions across use cases…(More)”.

FickleFormulas: The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Measurement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Statistics about economic activities are critical to governance. Measurements of growth, unemployment and inflation rates, public debts – they all tell us ‘how our economies are doing’ and inform policy. Citizens punish politicians who fail to deliver on them.

FickleFormulas has integrated two research projects at the University of Amsterdam that ran from 2014 to 2020. Its researchers have studied the origins of the formulas behind these indicators: why do we measure our economies the way we do? After all, it is far from self-evident how to define and measure economic indicators. Our choices have deeply distributional consequences, producing winners and losers, and they shape our future, for example when GDP figures hide the cost of environmental destruction.

Criticisms of particular measures are hardly new. GDP in particular has been denounced as a deeply deficient measure of production at best and a fundamentally misleading guidepost for human development at worst. But also measures of inflation, balances of payments and trade, unemployment figures, productivity or public debt hide unsolved and maybe insoluble problems. In FickleFormulas we have asked: which social, political and economic factors shape the formulas used to calculate macroeconomic indicators?

In our quest for answers we have mobilized scholarship and expertise scattered across academic disciplines – a wealth of knowledge brought together for example here. We have reconstructed expert-deliberations of past decades, but mostly we wanted to learn from those who actually design macroeconomic indicators: statisticians at national statistical offices or organizations such as the OECD, the UN, the IMF, or the World Bank. For us, understanding macroeconomic indicators has been impossible without talking to the people who live and breathe them….(More)”.

The contested role of AI ethics boards in smart societies: a step towards improvement based on board composition by sortition

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ludovico Giacomo Conti & Peter Seele: “The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy…(More)”.

Ranking Nations. The Value of Indicators and Indices?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Morse: “This engaging book assesses the statistical need for using particular ranking systems to compare the status of nations. With an overarching focus on human development, environmental performance and corruption, it carefully maps out some of the main processes associated with the ranking of countries.

Centrally, Stephen Morse explores challenges associated with using index-based rankings for countries. Examining international ranking systems such as the Human Development Index and Corruption Perception Index, the book considers what they tell us about the world and whether there may be alternatives to these ranking techniques. It provides an important contemporary view on ranking systems by analysing not only how they are reported by traditional sources of media, but also by social media.

Ranking Nations will be a significant read for economics, development studies and human geography researchers and academics. Its accessible written style will also benefit policy actors and decision makers that make use of index-based rankings…(More)”.

Towards a Holistic EU Data Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SITRA Publication: “The European Union’s ambitious data strategy aims to establish the EU as a leader in a data-driven society by creating a single market for data while fully respecting European policies on privacy, data protection, and competition law. To achieve the strategy’s bold aims, Europe needs more practical business cases where data flows across the organisations.

Reliable data sharing requires new technical, governance and business solutions. Data spaces address these needs by providing soft infrastructure to enable trusted and easy data flows across organisational boundaries.

Striking the right balance between regulation and innovation will be critical to creating a supportive environment for data-sharing business cases to flourish. In this working paper, we take an in-depth look at the governance issues surrounding data sharing and data spaces.

Data sharing requires trust. Trust can be facilitated by effective governance, meaning the rules for data sharing. These rules come from different arenas. The European Commission is establishing new regulations related to data, and member states also have their laws and authorities that oversee data-sharing activities. Ultimately, data spaces need local rules to enable interoperability and foster trust between participants. The governance framework for data spaces is called a rulebook, which codifies legal, business, technical, and ethical rules for data sharing.

The extensive discussions and interviews with experts reveal confusion in the field. People developing data sharing in practice or otherwise involved in data governance issues struggle to know who does what and who decides what. Data spaces also struggle to create internal governance structures in line with the regulatory environment. The interviews conducted for this study indicate that coordination at the member state level could play a decisive role in coordinating the EU-level strategy with concrete local data space initiatives.

The root cause of many of the pain points we identify is the problem of gaps, duplication and overlapping of roles between the different actors at all levels. To address these challenges and cultivate effective governance, a holistic data governance framework is proposed. This framework combines the existing approach of rulebooks with a new tool called the rolebook, which serves as a register of roles and bodies involved in data sharing. The rolebook aims to increase clarity and empower stakeholders at all levels to understand the current data governance structures.

In conclusion, effective governance is crucial for the success of the EU data strategy and the development of data spaces. By implementing the proposed holistic data governance framework, the EU can promote trust, balanced regulation and innovation, and support the growth of data spaces across sectors…(More)”.

AI chatbots do work of civil servants in productivity trial

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Paul Seddon: “Documents disclosed to the BBC have shed light on the use of AI-powered chatbot technology within government.

The chatbots have been used to analyse lengthy reports – a job that would normally be done by humans.

The Department for Education, which ran the trial, hopes it could boost productivity across Whitehall.

The PCS civil service union says it does not object to the use of AI – but clear guidelines are needed “so the benefits are shared by workers”.

The latest generation of chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), can quickly analyse reams of information, including images, to answer questions and summarise long articles.

They are expected to upend working practices across the economy in the coming years, and the government says they will have “significant implications” for the way officials work in future.

The education department ran the eight-week study over the summer under a contract with London-based company Faculty.ai, to test how so-called large language models (LLMs) could be used by officials.

The firm’s researchers used its access to a premium version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by OpenAI, to analyse draft local skills training plans that had been sent to the department to review.

These plans, drawn up by bodies representing local employers, are meant to influence the training offered by local further education colleges.

Results from the pilot are yet to be published, but documents and emails requested by the BBC under Freedom of Information laws offer an insight into the project’s aims.

According to an internal document setting out the reasons for the study, a chatbot would be used to summarise and compare the “main insights and themes” from the training plans.

The results, which were to be compared with summaries produced by civil servants, would test how Civil Service “productivity” might be improved.

It added that language models could analyse long, unstructured documents “where previously the only other option for be for individuals to read through all the reports”.

But the project’s aims went further, with hopes the chatbot could help provide “useful insights” that could help the department’s skills unit “identify future skills needs across the country”…(More)”.

The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Fernando Delgado, Stephen Yang, Michael Madaio, and Qian Yang: “Despite the growing consensus that stakeholders affected by AI systems should participate in their design, enormous variation and implicit disagreements exist among current approaches. For researchers and practitioners who are interested in taking a participatory approach to AI design and development, it remains challenging to assess the extent to which any participatory approach grants substantive agency to stakeholders. This article thus aims to ground what we dub the “participatory turn” in AI design by synthesizing existing theoretical literature on participation and through empirical investigation and critique of its current practices. Specifically, we derive a conceptual framework through synthesis of literature across technology design, political theory, and the social sciences that researchers and practitioners can leverage to evaluate approaches to participation in AI design. Additionally, we articulate empirical findings concerning the current state of participatory practice in AI design based on an analysis of recently published research and semi-structured interviews with 12 AI researchers and practitioners. We use these empirical findings to understand the current state of participatory practice and subsequently provide guidance to better align participatory goals and methods in a way that accounts for practical constraints…(More)”.

Public Net Worth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jacob Soll, Willem Buiter, John Crompton, Ian Ball, and Dag Detter: “As individuals, we depend on the services that governments provide. Collectively, we look to them to tackle the big problems – from long-term climate and demographic change to short-term crises like pandemics or war.  This is very expensive, and is getting more so.

But governments don’t provide – or use – basic financial information that every business is required to maintain. They ignore the value of public assets and most liabilities. This leads to inefficiency and bad decision-making, and piles up problems for the future.

Governments need to create balance sheets that properly reflect assets and liabilities, and to understand their future obligations and revenue prospects. Net Worth – both today and for the future – should be the measure of financial strength and success.

Only if this information is put at the centre of government financial decision-making can the present challenges to public finances around the world be addressed effectively, and in a way that is fair to future generations.

The good news is that there are ways to deal with these problems and make government finances more resilient and fairer to future generations.

The facts, and the solutions, are non-partisan, and so is this book. Responsible leaders of any political persuasion need to understand the issues and the tools that can enable them to deliver policy within these constraints…(More)”.

When it comes to AI and democracy, we cannot be careful enough

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Marietje Schaake: “Next year is being labelled the “Year of Democracy”: a series of key elections are scheduled to take place, including in places with significant power and populations, such as the US, EU, India, Indonesia and Mexico. In many of these jurisdictions, democracy is under threat or in decline. It is certain that our volatile world will look different after 2024. The question is how — and why.

Artificial intelligence is one of the wild cards that may well play a decisive role in the upcoming elections. The technology already features in varied ways in the electoral process — yet many of these products have barely been tested before their release into society.

Generative AI, which makes synthetic texts, videos and voice messages easy to produce and difficult to distinguish from human-generated content, has been embraced by some political campaign teams. A controversial video showing a crumbling world should Joe Biden be re-elected was not created by a foreign intelligence service seeking to manipulate US elections, but by the Republican National Committee. 

Foreign intelligence services are also using generative AI to boost their influence operations. My colleague at Stanford, Alex Stamos, warns that: “What once took a team of 20 to 40 people working out of [Russia or Iran] to produce 100,000 pieces can now be done by one person using open-source gen AI”.

AI also makes it easier to target messages so they reach specific audiences. This individualised experience will increase the complexity of investigating whether internet users and voters are being fed disinformation.

While much of generative AI’s impact on elections is still being studied, what is known does not reassure. We know people find it hard to distinguish between synthetic media and authentic voices, making it easy to deceive them. We also know that AI repeats and entrenches bias against minorities. Plus, we’re aware that AI companies seeking profits do not also seek to promote democratic values.  

Many members of the teams hired to deal with foreign manipulation and disinformation by social media companies, particularly since 2016, have been laid off. YouTube has explicitly said it will no longer remove “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections”. It is, of course, highly likely that lies about past elections will play a role in 2024 campaigns.

Similarly, after Elon Musk took over X, formerly known as Twitter, he gutted trust and safety teams. Right when defence barriers are needed the most, they are being taken down…(More)”.