Book by Thamy Pogrebinschi: “Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion…(More)”.
You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand
Article by Tim O’Reilly: “The world changed on November 30, 2022 as surely as it did on August 12, 1908 when the first Model T left the Ford assembly line. That was the date when OpenAI released ChatGPT, the day that AI emerged from research labs into an unsuspecting world. Within two months, ChatGPT had over a hundred million users—faster adoption than any technology in history.
The hand wringing soon began…
All of these efforts reflect the general consensus that regulations should address issues like data privacy and ownership, bias and fairness, transparency, accountability, and standards. OpenAI’s own AI safety and responsibility guidelines cite those same goals, but in addition call out what many people consider the central, most general question: how do we align AI-based decisions with human values? They write:
“AI systems are becoming a part of everyday life. The key is to ensure that these machines are aligned with human intentions and values.”
But whose human values? Those of the benevolent idealists that most AI critics aspire to be? Those of a public company bound to put shareholder value ahead of customers, suppliers, and society as a whole? Those of criminals or rogue states bent on causing harm to others? Those of someone well meaning who, like Aladdin, expresses an ill-considered wish to an all-powerful AI genie?
There is no simple way to solve the alignment problem. But alignment will be impossible without robust institutions for disclosure and auditing. If we want prosocial outcomes, we need to design and report on the metrics that explicitly aim for those outcomes and measure the extent to which they have been achieved. That is a crucial first step, and we should take it immediately. These systems are still very much under human control. For now, at least, they do what they are told, and when the results don’t match expectations, their training is quickly improved. What we need to know is what they are being told.
What should be disclosed? There is an important lesson for both companies and regulators in the rules by which corporations—which science-fiction writer Charlie Stross has memorably called “slow AIs”—are regulated. One way we hold companies accountable is by requiring them to share their financial results compliant with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or the International Financial Reporting Standards. If every company had a different way of reporting its finances, it would be impossible to regulate them…(More)”
MAPLE: The Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement
About: “MAPLE seeks to better connect its constituents to one another, and to our legislators. We hope to create a space for you to meaningfully engage in state government, learn about proposed legislation that impacts our lives in the Commonwealth, and share your expertise and stories. MAPLE aims to meaningfully channel and focus your civic energy towards productive actions for our state and local communities.
Today, there is no legal obligation for the MA legislature (formally known as “The General Court”) to disclose what written testimony they receive and, in practice, such disclosure very rarely happens. As a result, it can be difficult to understand what communications and perspectives are informing our legislators’ decisions. Often, even members of the legislature cannot easily access the public testimony given on a bill.
When you submit testimony via the MAPLE platform, you can publish it in a freely accessible online database (this website) so that all other stakeholders can read your perspective. We also help you find the right recipients in the legislature for your testimony, and prepare the email for you to send.
We hope this will help foster a greater capacity and means for self-governance and lead to better policy outcomes, with greater alignment to the needs, values, and objectives of the population of Massachusetts. While you certainly do not have to submit testimony via this website, we hope you will. Every piece of testimony published , and allows more people to gain from your knowledge and experience…(More)”.
How public money is shaping the future of AI
Report by Ethica: “The European Union aims to become the “home of trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” and has committed the biggest existing public funding to invest in AI over the next decade. However, the lack of accessible data and comprehensive reporting on the Framework Programmes’ results and impact hinder the EU’s capacity to achieve its objectives and undermine the credibility of its commitments.
This research commissioned by the European AI & Society Fund, recommends publicly accessible data, effective evaluation of the real-world impacts of funding, and mechanisms for civil society participation in funding before investing further public funds to achieve the EU’s goal of being the epicenter of trustworthy AI.
Among its findings, the research has highlighted the negative impact of the European Union’s investment in artificial intelligence (AI). The EU invested €10bn into AI via its Framework Programmes between 2014 and 2020, representing 13.4% of all available funding. However, the investment process is top-down, with little input from researchers or feedback from previous grantees or civil society organizations. Furthermore, despite the EU’s aim to fund market-focused innovation, research institutions and higher and secondary education establishments received 73% of the total funding between 2007 and 2020. Germany, France, and the UK were the largest recipients, receiving 37.4% of the total EU budget.
The report also explores the lack of commitment to ethical AI, with only 30.3% of funding calls related to AI mentioning trustworthiness, privacy, or ethics. Additionally, civil society organizations are not involved in the design of funding programs, and there is no evaluation of the economic or societal impact of the funded work. The report calls for political priorities to align with funding outcomes in specific, measurable ways, citing transport as the most funded sector in AI despite not being an EU strategic focus, while programs to promote SME and societal participation in scientific innovation have been dropped….(More)”.
The Rule of Law
Paper by Cass R. Sunstein: “The concept of the rule of law is invoked for purposes that are both numerous and diverse, and that concept is often said to overlap with, or to require, an assortment of other practices and ideals, including democracy, free elections, free markets, property rights, and freedom of speech. It is best to understand the concept in a more specific way, with a commitment to seven principles: (1) clear, general, publicly accessible rules laid down in advance; (2) prospectivity rather than retroactivity; (3) conformity between law on the books and law in the world; (4) hearing rights; (5) some degree of separation between (a) law-making and law enforcement and (b) interpretation of law; (6) no unduly rapid changes in the law; and (7) no contradictions or palpable inconsistency in the law. This account of the rule of law conflicts with those offered by (among many others) Friedrich Hayek and Morton Horwitz, who conflate the idea with other, quite different ideas and practices. Of course it is true that the seven principles can be specified in different ways, broadly compatible with the goal of describing the rule of law as a distinct concept, and some of the seven principles might be understood to be more fundamental than others…(More)”.
A case for democracy’s digital playground
Article by Petr Špecián: “Institutions are societies’ building blocks. Their role in shaping and channelling human potential is crucial. Yet the vast space of possible institutional designs remains largely unexplored…In the institutional landscape, there are plenty of alternative designs to explore. Some of them, such as replacing elected representation with sortition, look promising. But if they appear only faintly through the mist of uncertainty, their implementation would be an overly risky endeavour. We need more data to get a better idea of our options.
To explore alternative designs for the institutional landscape, we first need more data. I propose testing new institutional designs in a ‘digital playground’ of democracy
Currently, the multitude of reform proposals overwhelms the modest capacities available for their empirical testing. Only those most prominent — such as deliberative democracy — command enough resources to enable serious examination.
And the stakes are momentous. What if a radical reform of the political institutions proves disastrous? Clever speculations combined with scant experimental evidence cannot dispel reasonable doubts.
This is where my proposal for democracy’s digital playground comes in….Democracy’s digital playground is an artificial world in which institutional mechanisms are tested and compete against each other.
In some ways, it resembles massive multiplayer online games that emulate many of the real world’s crucial features. These games encourage people to work together to overcome challenges, which then motivates them to create political institutions conducive to their efforts. They can also migrate between communities, revealing their preference for alternative modes of governance.
A ‘digital playground’ of democracy emulates real-world features. It encourages people to work together to overcome challenges, thus creating conducive political institutions
That said, digital game-worlds in their current form have limited use for democratic experimentation. Their institution-building tools are crude, since much of the cooperation and conflict resolution happens outside the game environment itself, through forums and chats. Nor do these communities accurately represent the diversity of populations in real-world democracies. Players are predominantly young males with ample free time. And the games’ commercial purpose hinders the researchers’ quest for knowledge, too.
But perhaps these digital worlds can be adapted. Compared with the current methods used to test institutional mechanisms, they offer many advantages. Transparency is one such: a human-designed world is less opaque than the natural world. Easy participation represents another: regardless of location or resources, diverse people may join the community.
However, most important of all is the opportunity to calibrate the digital worlds as an optimum risk environment…(More)”.
Can A.I. and Democracy Fix Each Other?
Peter Coy at The New York Times: “Democracy isn’t working very well these days, and artificial intelligence is scaring the daylights out of people. Some creative people are looking at those two problems and envisioning a solution: Democracy fixes A.I., and A.I. fixes democracy.
Attitudes about A.I. are polarized, with some focusing on its promise to amplify human potential and others dwelling on what could go wrong (and what has already gone wrong). We need to find a way out of the impasse, and leaving it to the tech bros isn’t the answer. Democracy — giving everyone a voice on policy — is clearly the way to go.
Democracy can be taken hostage by partisans, though. That’s where artificial intelligence has a role to play. It can make democracy work better by surfacing ideas from everyone, not just the loudest. It can find surprising points of agreement among seeming antagonists and summarize and digest public opinion in a way that’s useful to government officials. Assisting democracy is a more socially valuable function for large language models than, say, writing commercials for Spam in iambic pentameter.The goal, according to the people I spoke to, is to make A.I. part of the solution, not just part of the problem…(More)” (See also: Where and when AI and CI meet: exploring the intersection of artificial and collective intelligence towards the goal of innovating how we govern…)”.
To Tackle Climate Change, We Need To Update Democracy
Article by Mark Baldassare and Cheryl Katz: “…Engaging the public through direct democracy can provide an antidote to the widespread government distrust and extreme political polarization that is currently paralyzing the nation. As shown by the overwhelming and bipartisan support for the outcome of a ballot measure such as Proposition 20’s Coastal Commission, statutes enacted through the initiative process have the potential to stand the test of time. State lawmakers, in turn, feel the weight of public opinion and are loath to tinker with laws that have received majority endorsement.
The seeming intractability of citizens’ initiatives could be seen as an argument against direct democracy. This was exemplified by recent failed propositions aimed at changing the low commercial property tax rates set by the 1978 Proposition 13 (i.e. 2020 Proposition 15) and at ending the ban on affirmative action programs established by the 1996 Proposition 209 (i.e. 2020 Proposition 16). One reason these efforts were doomed is that proponents failed to engage with the public on such controversial policy issues and did not overcome voters’ inherent skepticism. When voters are dubious about a measure’s intentions or outcome, the default is to say “no” — shown by the historical initiative pass rate of 35%.
“Giving citizens agency in tackling the planet’s most pressing issue stands to motivate them to adopt difficult measures and make the lifestyle changes required.”
Another form of direct democracy is citizens assemblies, in which a large group of randomly selected members of the public engage in guided discussions and make policy recommendations. When applied to climate change, giving citizens agency in tackling the planet’s most pressing issue stands to motivate them to adopt difficult measures and make the lifestyle changes required. For example, political scientist Carsten Berg’s analysis of the citizens’ assemblies convened for the European Union’s Conference on the Future of Europe in 2022 describes how participation engendered a sense of group purpose and spurred collaboration toward a common goal.
Direct democracy tools can help overcome the public’s feelings of helplessness in the face of the climate crisis and generate a shared sense of responsibility for mitigation. A 2022 research report examined the emotional experiences of participants in a 2020-21 Scottish citizens’ assembly convened to address the question of how Scotland could “tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way.” Compared to the general population, writes Lancaster University researcher Nadine Andrews, assembly members had “higher levels of hopefulness and optimism, lower levels of worry and overwhelm, and a lower proportion reporting that their emotions about climate change were having a negative impact on their mental health,” while participating in the process. Participants told Andrews they felt a sense of agency and empowerment to change their behavior and take “urgent climate action.”
While invaluable for promoting climate justice, however, citizens’ assemblies have lacked the authority to create policy. As Berg points out, the outcome of the Future of Europe deliberations was non-binding, had a small reach and received little public attention. And Andrews found that participants’ hope and optimism about tackling climate change dropped in the wake of the Scottish government’s lackluster response to the panel’s report. The outcome of any such effort in California will need to be much more results-oriented…(More)”.
The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism
Essay by Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade: “While people in and around the tech industry debate whether algorithms are political at all, social scientists take the politics as a given, asking instead how this politics unfolds: how algorithms concretely govern. What we call “high-tech modernism”—the application of machine learning algorithms to organize our social, economic, and political life—has a dual logic. On the one hand, like traditional bureaucracy, it is an engine of classification, even if it categorizes people and things very differently. On the other, like the market, it provides a means of self-adjusting allocation, though its feedback loops work differently from the price system. Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes…(More)”.
Advancing Technology for Democracy
The White House: “The first wave of the digital revolution promised that new technologies would support democracy and human rights. The second saw an authoritarian counterrevolution. Now, the United States and other democracies are working together to ensure that the third wave of the digital revolution leads to a technological ecosystem characterized by resilience, integrity, openness, trust and security, and that reinforces democratic principles and human rights.
Together, we are organizing and mobilizing to ensure that technologies work for, not against, democratic principles, institutions, and societies. In so doing, we will continue to engage the private sector, including by holding technology platforms accountable when they do not take action to counter the harms they cause, and by encouraging them to live up to democratic principles and shared values…
Key deliverables announced or highlighted at the second Summit for Democracy include:
- National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics. OSTP released a National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics, a roadmap for harnessing privacy-enhancing technologies, coupled with strong governance, to enable data sharing and analytics in a way that benefits individuals and society, while mitigating privacy risks and harms and upholding democratic principles.
- National Objectives for Digital Assets Research and Development. OSTP also released a set of National Objectives for Digital Assets Research and Development, whichoutline its priorities for the responsible research and development (R&D) of digital assets. These objectives will help developers of digital assets better reinforce democratic principles and protect consumers by default.
- Launch of Trustworthy and Responsible AI Resource Center for Risk Management. NIST announced a new Resource Center, which is designed as a one-stop-shop website for foundational content, technical documents, and toolkits to enable responsible use of AI. Government, industry, and academic stakeholders can access resources such as a repository for AI standards, measurement methods and metrics, and data sets. The website is designed to facilitate the implementation and international alignment with the AI Risk Management Framework. The Framework articulates the key building blocks of trustworthy AI and offers guidance for addressing them.
- International Grand Challenges on Democracy-Affirming Technologies. Announced at the first Summit, the United States and the United Kingdom carried out their joint Privacy Enhancing Technology Prize Challenges. IE University, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, hosted the Tech4Democracy Global Entrepreneurship Challenge. The winners, selected from around the world, were featured at the second Summit….(More)”.