The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie: “Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose.

The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny…(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Values

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of the Turkish Policy Quarterly (TPQ): “…Artificial intelligence has fast become part of everyday life, and we wanted to understand how it fits into democratic values. It was important for us to ask how we can ensure that AI and digital policies will promote broad social inclusion, which relies on fundamental rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law. There seems to be no shortage of principles and concepts that support the fair and responsible use of AI systems, yet it’s difficult to determine how to efficiently manage or deploy those systems today.

Merve Hickok and Marc Rotenberg, two TPQ Advisory Board members, wrote the lead article for this issue. In a world where data means power, vast amounts of data are collected every day by both private companies and government agencies, which then use this data to fuel complex systems for automated decision-making now broadly described as “Artificial Intelligence.” Activities managed with these AI systems range from policing to military, to access to public services and resources such as benefits, education, and employment. The expected benefits from having national talent, capacity, and capabilities to develop and deploy these systems also drive a lot of national governments to prioritize AI and digital policies. A crucial question for policymakers is how to reap the benefits while reducing the negative impacts of these sociotechnical systems on society.

Gabriela Ramos, Assistant Director-General for Social and Human Sciences of UNESCO, has written an article entitled “Ethics of AI and Democracy: UNESCO’s Recommendation’s Insights”. In her article, she discusses how artificial intelligence (AI) can affect democracy. The article discusses the ways in which Artificial Intelligence is affecting democratic processes, democratic values, and the political and social behavior of citizens. The article notes that the use of artificial intelligence, and its potential abuse by some government entities, as well as by big private corporations, poses a serious threat to rights-based democratic institutions, processes, and norms. UNESCO announced a remarkable consensus agreement among 193 member states creating the first-ever global standard on the ethics of AI that could serve as a blueprint for national AI legislation and a global AI ethics benchmark.

Paul Nemitz, Principal Adviser on Justice Policy at the EU Commission, addresses the question of what drives democracy. In his view, technology has undoubtedly shaped democracy. However, technology as well as legal rules regarding technology have shaped and have been shaped by democracy. This is why he says it is essential to develop and use technology according to democratic principles. He writes that there are libertarians today who purposefully design technological systems in such a way that challenges democratic control. It is, however, clear that there is enough counterpower and engagement, at least in Europe, to keep democracy functioning, as long as we work together to create rules that are sensible for democracy’s future and confirm democracy’s supremacy over technology and business interests.

Research associate at the University of Oxford and Professor at European University Cyprus, Paul Timmers, writes about how AI challenges sovereignty and democracy. AI is wonderful. AI is scary. AI is the path to paradise. AI is the path to hell.  What do we make of these contradictory images when, in a world of AI, we seek to both protect sovereignty and respect democratic values? Neither a techno-utopian nor a dystopian view of AI is helpful. The direction of travel must be global guidance and national or regional AI law that stresses end-to-end accountability and AI transparency, while recognizing practical and fundamental limits.

Tania Sourdin, Dean of Newcastle Law School, Australia, asks: what if judges were replaced by AI? She believes that although AI will increasingly be used to support judges when making decisions in most jurisdictions, there will also be attempts over the next decade to totally replace judges with AI. Increasingly, we are seeing a shift towards Judge AI, and to a certain extent we are seeing shifts towards supporting Judge AI, which raises concerns related to democratic values, structures, and what judicial independence means. The reason for this may be partly due to the systems used being set up to support a legal interpretation that fails to allow for a nuanced and contextual view of the law.

Pam Dixon, Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum, writes about biometric technologies. She says that biometric technologies encompass many types, or modalities, of biometrics today, such as face recognition, iris recognition, fingerprint recognition, and DNA recognition, both separately and in combination. A growing body of law and regulations seeks to mitigate the risks associated with biometric technologies as they are increasingly understood as a technology of concern based on scientific data.

We invite you to learn more about how our world is changing. As a way to honor this milestone, we have assembled a list of articles from around the world from some of the best experts in their field. This issue would not be possible without the assistance of many people. In addition to the contributing authors, there were many other individuals who contributed greatly. TPQ’s team is proud to present you with this edition….(More)” (Full list)”

Controversy Mapping: A Field Guide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tommaso Venturini, and Anders Kristian Munk: “As disputes concerning the environment, the economy, and pandemics occupy public debate, we need to learn to navigate matters of public concern when facts are in doubt and expertise is contested.

Controversy Mapping is the first book to introduce readers to the observation and representation of contested issues on digital media. Drawing on actor-network theory and digital methods, Venturini and Munk outline the conceptual underpinnings and the many tools and techniques of controversy mapping. They review its history in science and technology studies, discuss its methodological potential, and unfold its political implications. Through a range of cases and examples, they demonstrate how to chart actors and issues using digital fieldwork and computational techniques. A preface by Richard Rogers and an interview with Bruno Latour are also included.

A crucial field guide and hands-on companion for the digital age, Controversy Mapping is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as activists, journalists, citizens, and decision makers…(More)”.

Can Ukraine’s Experiments in Local Democracy Survive the Invasion?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joe Mathews at Zocolo: “As I write this, Russian troops reportedly are moving north through the Odesa oblast, or region, toward the river Kodyma, along which sits a town called Balta.

This is not new territory for Balta, which like much of Ukraine has been contested over centuries of wars. But in recent years, Balta has actually broken a lot of new ground, at least when it comes to the practice of citizen-centered democracy. In 2016, Balta adopted participatory budgeting, an innovative process—originated in Brazil—in which citizens rather than officials determine their local budget. Balta also gave its young people their own governing council and a decision-making process to influence local policies.

Democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Such self-government happens most often at the local level, which is why countries tend to get more democratic when they decentralize.

Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth….

In a politically divided Ukraine, this devolution of local power had support across the spectrum, for a couple reasons.

The first was positive and driven by economics. Putting more money and power in localities was seen as the best bet for addressing poverty and inequality, and developing Ukraine in a balanced way that would make it a better fit with the rest of Europe, which has strong local governments. Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth.

The second reason, however, was defensive: the threat of separatism. In a country the size of Texas, greater local control was seen as the best way to placate localities and regions that might think of leaving—especially Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking Ukrainian oblasts where Russia would make incursions (and which Putin would declare “independent” as a pretext for his new invasion).

“The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor,” said Andriy Parubiy, a former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, in 2017. “The process of the formation of capable communities was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.”

Many of these newly empowered Ukrainian local governments have seized the opportunity, and not just for economic development. Municipalities have embraced political reforms—adopting ethics codes, making their records and decision-making transparent, establishing citizen-directed processes like participatory budgeting, and adding new guarantees for representation and participation of women, men, and underrepresented groups in local politics.

Just this past December, two Ukrainian cities, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia, finished first and third, respectively, in a global contest for innovation in government transparency. Mariupol, a city in the southeast reportedly under siege by the Russian military, has won international praise for its model of sharing governance power with local organizations….(More)”.

Where Do My Tax Dollars Go? Tax Morale Effects of Perceived Government Spending

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Matias Giaccobasso, Brad C. Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia & Alejandro Zentner: “Do perceptions about how the government spends tax dollars affect the willingness to pay taxes? We designed a field experiment to test this hypothesis in a natural, high-stakes context and via revealed preferences. We measure perceptions about the share of property tax revenues that fund public schools and the share of property taxes that are redistributed to disadvantaged districts. We find that even though information on where tax dollars go is publicly available and easily accessible, taxpayers still have significant misperceptions. We use an information-provision experiment to induce exogenous shocks to these perceptions. Using administrative data on tax appeals, we measure the causal effect of perceived government spending on the willingness to pay taxes. We find that some perceptions about government spending have a significant effect on the probability of filing a tax appeal and in a manner that is consistent with the classical theory of benefit-based taxation. We discuss implications for researchers and policy makers…(More)”.

GovTech Practices in the EU

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Kuziemski, M., Mergel, I., Ulrich, P. and Martinez, A.: “To support governments in the EU embracing GovTech, this report provides an overview of the diversity of GovTech programmes and shares lessons learnt for setting up government-run GovTech programmes. While the focus of this report is on national GovTech programmes, its findings and conclusions can be applied to others levels of government as well. The term GovTech refers to the use of emerging technologies and digital products and services by government from start-ups and SMEs – instead of relying on large system integrators. This report presents an overview of how the existing GovTech programmes are set up in different EU member states and introduces practical case studies. This is followed by a discussion of the rationale of governments’ investment in GovTech and the barriers countries have encountered when engaging with the GovTech ecosystem. The report then distils important lessons learned for setting up government-run GovTech programmes. This report is aimed at anyone wanting to understand how governments are already supporting GovTech, and especially public sector managers who are looking for a starting point for establishing or improving a GovTech programme. It is part of two twin reports on GovTech developed by the JRC with support from the ISA² programme…(More)”.

A participatory approach for empowering community engagement in data governance: The Monash Net Zero Precinct

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Darren Sharp et al: “Data governance is an emerging field of study concerned with how a range of actors can successfully manage data assets according to rules of engagement, decision rights, and accountabilities. Urban studies scholarship has continued to demonstrate and criticize lack of community engagement in smart city development and urban data governance projects, including in local sustainability initiatives. However, few move beyond critique to unpack in more detail what community engagement should look like. To overcome this gap, we develop and test a participatory methodology to identify approaches to empowering community engagement in data governance in the context of the Monash Net Zero Precinct in Melbourne, Australia. Our approach uses design for social innovation to enable a small group of “precinct citizens” to co-design prototypes and multicriteria mapping as a participatory appraisal method to open up and reveal a diversity of perspectives and uncertainties on data governance approaches. The findings reveal the importance of creating deliberative spaces for pluralising community engagement in data governance that consider the diverse values and interests of precinct citizens. This research points toward new ways to conceptualize and design enabling processes of community engagement in data governance and reflects on implementation strategies attuned to the politics of participation to support the embedding of these innovations within specific socio-institutional contexts….(More)”.

A little less conversation, a little more action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Mariana Mazzucato, Rainer Kattel and Rowan Conway: “The risk with any new economic movement is that it remains closed within the confines of high level academic and conceptual debates — which sadly then forms part of the “blah blah blah” rather than moving policy practice forward. At IIPP, we never wanted to advocate for policy from an Ivory tower. From the day we started, we got our hands dirty and worked with policymakers in practice to co-design new tools and frameworks for inclusive, healthy and sustainable growth. While bold economics research is crucial, the work ‘on the ground’ with public organisations is equally critical in order to change public policy practice and so we have been exploring practical ways to translate this new economic thinking into policy change at the place or institutional level.

This has included a wide range of deep dives that ultimately led to the Mission-Oriented Horizon 2020 programme and policy guidance for the EU. This guidance then unlocked funding for research and innovation across members states, the MOIIS commission that drove challenge-oriented innovation and industrial strategy into UK government, and our work with the Scottish Government that helped to develop and launch a new mission-oriented national bank (Scottish National Investment Bank). Since then, we have worked on more deep dives with our growing MOIN network and other policy-making bodies — at a city level in Camden in London and Biscay region of Spain, in national and regional governments in British Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden — as well as with key public institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the BBC where we developed an evaluation framework to measure dynamic public value.

Practice-based theorising in action

These deep dives are not simply standard academic or think tank round tables — they are what we call “practice-based theorising”. This means taking insights from pioneering research, enabling co-creation and setting a route to implementation when it comes to policy, and by using participatory research, engagement and design processes to bridge the gap between theory and practice. It is this collaborative work with policymakers that makes IIPP different. Through practice-based theorising our researchers bring new theories to policymakers, not just offering a theoretical stance but engaging, experimenting and evolving these concepts in practice. Through deep dives we have learned a great deal from practice and these lessons then feed back into the theory itself, and ultimately into what we teach through our Masters in Public Administration.

Practice-based theorising takes artful engagement of cross-disciplinary actors in multiple sectors and places. Using dynamic research methods, participatory co-design workshops and rapid prototyping, we learn from the places we work in and translate IIPP’s key economic theories into testable policy innovations. We also teach our MPA students many of the participatory design processes we deploy via our MPA module called “Transformation by Design” which acts as the connecting tissue between the taught course and the placement semester within our policymaking network organisations….(More)”

The Summit for Democracy commitments are out—now what?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Norman Eisen, Mario Picon, Robin J. Lewis, Renzo Falla, and Lilly Blumenthal: “On February 14, 2022, two months after the first Summit for Democracy, the U.S. Department of State released written commitments from 56 governments focused on strengthening democracy, combatting corruption, and defending human rights. Now the post-summit Year of Action can begin in earnest. As two of us discussed in a post right after the Summit, for the event to achieve its objectives, civil society, the private sector, and other good governance champions must work with and hold governments accountable for the implementation of concrete, measurable, and meaningful commitments.

From our initial survey, we observe significant variation in terms of the specificity and nature of commitments published thus far. Here, we offer a brief snapshot of the distribution of countries with published commitments, the range of those commitments, and their significance. Our initial reactions are preliminary; this post offers a roadmap for the deeper reading and analysis of the commitments that we and many others will undertake.

The countries that have submitted written commitments to date fall along the spectrum of governance regimes, as defined by the recently released Democracy Index 2021 from the Economist Intelligence Unit. 53 of 167 countries featured in the index provided written commitments with clear over-representation of those classified as full democracies—18 out of 21 full democracies submitted commitments. Meanwhile, 26 out of 53 countries considered flawed democracies submitted commitments. An even smaller group of hybrid regimes (that is, ones that combine democratic and autocratic features; 8 out of 34 countries) and a minuscule proportion of countries under what are considered authoritarian regimes (1 out of 59 countries) responded to the call for written commitments.

Among these submissions, the nature of the commitments varies. Most countries offer some commitments on the domestic front, but many, particularly the full democracies, focus on the international arena. As examples, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s commitments include “organizing elections within constitutional deadlines,” while New Zealand’s include a pledge of “1 million NZD to support anti-corruption within the Pacific region.”…(More)”.

Collaborative Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

eBook by PublicInput: “…Democracy is an emergent phenomenon that evolves and changes over time.  Amid the constant and ever-present circumstances of change, collaborative democracy is the next phase in the evolution of democracy itself.  When we zoom out over the historical trend line from anarchy to democracy, this evolution looks like this:   

Collaborative democracy, as the next phase in the evolution of democracy, will be enabled not through more conflict, but rather through technological innovation…(More)”.