It’s like jury duty, but for getting things done

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hollie Russon Gilman and Amy Eisenstein: “Citizens’ assemblies have the potential to repair our broken politics…Imagine a democracy where people come together and their voices are heard and are translated directly into policy. Frontline workers, doctors, teachers, friends, and neighbors — young and old — are brought together in a random, representative sample to deliberate the most pressing issues facing our society. And they are compensated for their time.

The concept may sound radical. But we already use this method for jury duty. Why not try this widely accepted practice to tackle the deepest, most crucial, and most divisive issues facing our democracy?

The idea — known today as citizens’ assemblies — originated in ancient Athens. Instead of a top-down government, Athens used sortition — a system that was horizontal and distributive. The kleroterion, an allotment machine, randomly selected citizens to hold civic office, ensuring that the people had a direct say in their government’s dealings….(More)”.

The Design of Digital Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gianluca Sgueo: “Ever-stronger ties between technology, entertainment and design are transforming our relationship with democratic decision-making. When we are online, or when we use digital products and services, we tend to focus more on certain factors like speed of service and user-friendliness, and to overlook the costs – both for ourselves and others. As a result, a widening gap separates our expectations of everything related to digitalization – including government – and the actual practice of democratic governance. Democratic regulators, unable to meet citizens’ demands for tangible, fast and gratifying returns, are seeing the poorest results ever recorded in terms of interest, engagement and retention, despite using the most cutting-edge technologies.

This book explores various aspects of the relationship between democracy, technology and entertainment. These include, on the one hand, the role that digital technology has in strengthening our collective intelligence, nurturing empathic relations between citizens and democratic institutions, and supporting processes of political aggregation, deliberation and collaboration. On the other hand, they comprise the challenges accompanying digital technology for representation, transparency and inclusivity in democratic decision-making.

The book’s main argument is that digital democratic spaces should be redesigned to narrow the gap between the expectations and outcomes of democratic decision-making. It suggests abandoning the notion of digital participatory rights as being fast and easy to enjoy. It also refutes the notion that digital democratic decision-making can only be effective when it delivers rapid and successful responses to the issues of the day, regardless of their complexity.

Ultimately, the success or failure of digital democracy will depend on the ability of public regulators to design digital public spaces with a commitment to complexity, so as to make them appealing, but also effective at engaging citizens…(More)”.

The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Adam Grant: “On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.

If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picked systematically. But in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.

Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.

When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group’s decisions.

Over the past year I’ve floated the idea of sortition with a number of current members of Congress. Their immediate concern is ability: How do we make sure that citizens chosen randomly are capable of governing?

In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution…(More)”.

The Legal Singularity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie: “…argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the “technological singularity,” The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional “completeness” of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions…(More)”.

Driving Excellence in Official Statistics: Unleashing the Potential of Comprehensive Digital Data Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hossein Hassani and Steve McFeely: “With the ubiquitous use of digital technologies and the consequent data deluge, official statistics faces new challenges and opportunities. In this context, strengthening official statistics through effective data governance will be crucial to ensure reliability, quality, and access to data. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for digital data governance for official statistics, addressing key components, such as data collection and management, processing and analysis, data sharing and dissemination, as well as privacy and ethical considerations. The framework integrates principles of data governance into digital statistical processes, enabling statistical organizations to navigate the complexities of the digital environment. Drawing on case studies and best practices, the paper highlights successful implementations of digital data governance in official statistics. The paper concludes by discussing future trends and directions, including emerging technologies and opportunities for advancing digital data governance…(More)”.

The Urgent Need to Reimagine Data Consent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Laura Sandor & Julia Stamm: “Recognizing the significant benefits that can arise from the use and reuse of data to tackle contemporary challenges such as migration, it is worth exploring new approaches to collect and utilize data that empower individuals and communities, granting them the ability to determine how their data can be utilized for various personal, community, and societal causes. This need is not specific to migrants alone. It applies to various regions, populations, and fields, ranging from public health and education to urban mobility. There is a pressing demand to involve communities, often already vulnerable, to establish responsible access to their data that aligns with their expectations, while simultaneously serving the greater public good.

We believe the answer lies through a reimagination of the concept of consent. Traditionally, consent has been the tool of choice to secure agency and individual rights, but that concept, we would suggest, is no longer sufficient to today’s era of datafication. Instead, we should strive to establish a new standard of social license. Here, we’ll define what we mean by a social license and outline some of the limitations of consent (as it is typically defined and practiced today). Then we’ll describe one possible means of securing social license—through participatory decision -making…(More)”.

Experimentation spaces for regulatory learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Staff Working Document by the European Commission: “..one of the actions of the New European Innovation Agenda sets out available experimentation tools (especially regulatory sandboxes, but also testbeds and living labs) and showcases existing examples from Europe and beyond on how the European Union and national governments can support and engage innovators in the regulatory process.

Experimentation is a key-component of innovation. European innovators are facing new challenges, also in terms of different or limited experimentation spaces and related regulations.

The Staff Working Document presents a general overview on these experimentation spaces and includes a special focus on the energy sector, in line with the RePowerEU Communication.

The New European Innovation Agenda, adopted on 5 July 2022, aims to position Europe at the forefront of the new wave of deep tech innovation and start-ups. It will help Europe to develop new technologies to address the most pressing societal challenges, and to bring them on the market. Europe wants to be the place where the best talent work hand in hand with the best companies and where deep tech innovation thrives and creates breakthrough innovative solutions across the continent.

One of the five flagships of the New European Innovation Agenda refers to “enabling deep tech innovation through experimentation spaces and public procurement. It includes this guidance document on experimentation spaces as one of the main deliverables, together with a revised state aid framework for Research and Development, experimentation facilities for AI innovation and the setting-up of an “Innovation Friendly Regulations Advisory Group” working on virtual worlds.  

Regulatory sandboxes are schemes that enable testing innovations in a controlled real world environment, that may include temporary loosening of applicable rules while safeguarding regulatory objectives such as safety and consumer protection.

Test beds are experimentation spaces with a technological focus that do not necessarily have a regulatory component.

Living labs are based on co-creation and on the experience and involvement of users and citizens…(More)”.

Tyranny of the Minority

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

With the clarity and brilliance that made their first book, How Democracies Die, a global bestseller, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a coherent framework for understanding these volatile times. They draw on a wealth of examples—from 1930s France to present-day Thailand—to explain why and how political parties turn against democracy. They then show how our Constitution makes us uniquely vulnerable to attacks from within: It is a pernicious enabler of minority rule, allowing partisan minorities to consistently thwart and even rule over popular majorities. Most modern democracies—from Germany and Sweden to Argentina and New Zealand—have eliminated outdated institutions like elite upper chambers, indirect elections, and lifetime tenure for judges. The United States lags dangerously behind.

In this revelatory book, Levitsky and Ziblatt issue an urgent call to reform our politics. It’s a daunting task, but we have remade our country before—most notably, after the Civil War and during the Progressive Era. And now we are at a crossroads: America will either become a multiracial democracy or cease to be a democracy at all…(More)”.

Changing Facebook’s algorithm won’t fix polarization, new study finds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Naomi Nix, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Cat Zakrzewski: “For years, regulators and activists have worried that social media companies’ algorithms were dividing the United States with politically toxic posts and conspiracies. The concern was so widespread that in 2020, Meta flung open troves of internal data for university academics to study how Facebook and Instagram would affect the upcoming presidential election.

The first results of that research show that the company’s platforms play a critical role in funneling users to partisan information with which they are likely to agree. But the results cast doubt on assumptions that the strategies Meta could use to discourage virality and engagement on its social networks would substantially affect people’s political beliefs.

“Algorithms are extremely influential in terms of what people see on the platform, and in terms of shaping their on-platform experience,” Joshua Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and one of the leaders on the research project, said in an interview.

“Despite the fact that we find this big impact in people’s on-platform experience, we find very little impact in changes to people’s attitudes about politics and even people’s self-reported participation around politics.”

The first four studies, which were released on Thursday in the journals Science and Nature, are the result of a unique partnership between university researchers and Meta’s own analysts to study how social media affects political polarization and people’s understanding and opinions about news, government and democracy. The researchers, who relied on Meta for data and the ability to run experiments, analyzed those issues during the run-up to the 2020 election. The studies were peer-reviewed before publication, a standard procedure in science in which papers are sent out to other experts in the field who assess the work’s merit.

As part of the project, researchers altered the feeds of thousands of people using Facebook and Instagram in fall of 2020 to see if that could change political beliefs, knowledge or polarization by exposing them to different information than they might normally have received. The researchers generally concluded that such changes had little impact.

The collaboration, which is expected to be released over a dozen studies, also will examine data collected after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Tucker said…(More)”.

Corporate Responsibility in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Maria Eitel: “In the past year, a cacophony of conversations about artificial intelligence has erupted. Depending on whom you listen to, AI is either carrying us into a shiny new world of endless possibilities or propelling us toward a grim dystopia. Call them the Barbie and Oppenheimer scenarios – as attention-grabbing and different as the Hollywood blockbusters of the summer. But one conversation is getting far too little attention: the one about corporate responsibility.

I joined Nike as its first Vice President of Corporate Responsibility in 1998, landing right in the middle of the hyper-globalization era’s biggest corporate crisis: the iconic sports and fitness company had become the face of labor exploitation in developing countries. In dealing with that crisis and setting up corporate responsibility for Nike, we learned hard-earned lessons, which can now help guide our efforts to navigate the AI revolution.

There is a key difference today. Taking place in the late 1990s, the Nike drama played out relatively slowly. When it comes to AI, however, we don’t have the luxury of time. This time last year, most people had not heard about generative AI. The technology entered our collective awareness like a lightning strike in late 2022, and we have been trying to make sense of it ever since…

Our collective future now hinges on whether companies – in the privacy of their board rooms, executive meetings, and closed-door strategy sessions – decide to do what is right. Companies need a clear North Star to which they can always refer as they pursue innovation. Google had it right in its early days, when its corporate credo was, “Don’t Be Evil.” No corporation should knowingly harm people in the pursuit of profit.

It will not be enough for companies simply to say that they have hired former regulators and propose possible solutions. Companies must devise credible and effective AI action plans that answer five key questions:

  • What are the potential unanticipated consequences of AI?
  • How are you mitigating each identified risk?
  • What measures can regulators use to monitor companies’ efforts to mitigate potential dangers and hold them accountable?
  • What resources do regulators need to carry out this task?
  • How will we know that the guardrails are working?

The AI challenge needs to be treated like any other corporate sprint. Requiring companies to commit to an action plan in 90 days is reasonable and realistic. No excuses. Missed deadlines should result in painful fines. The plan doesn’t have to be perfect – and it will likely need to be adapted as we continue to learn – but committing to it is essential…(More)”.