Paper by Joon Sung Park: “The promise of human behavioral simulation–general-purpose computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains–could enable broad applications in policymaking and social science. We present a novel agent architecture that simulates the attitudes and behaviors of 1,052 real individuals–applying large language models to qualitative interviews about their lives, then measuring how well these agents replicate the attitudes and behaviors of the individuals that they represent. The generative agents replicate participants’ responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later, and perform comparably in predicting personality traits and outcomes in experimental replications. Our architecture reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions. This work provides a foundation for new tools that can help investigate individual and collective behavior…(More)”.
What AI Can’t Do for Democracy
Essay by Daniel Berliner: “In short, there is increasing optimism among both theorists and practitioners over the potential for technology-enabled civic engagement to rejuvenate or deepen democracy. Is this optimism justified?
The answer depends on how we think about what civic engagement can do. Political representatives are often unresponsive to the preferences of ordinary people. Their misperceptions of public needs and preferences are partly to blame, but the sources of democratic dysfunction are much deeper and more structural than information alone. Working to ensure many more “citizens’ voices are truly heard” will thus do little to improve government responsiveness in contexts where the distribution of power means that policymakers have no incentive to do what citizens say. And as some critics have argued, it can even distract from recognizing and remedying other problems, creating a veneer of legitimacy—what health policy expert Sherry Arnstein once famously derided as mere “window dressing.”
Still, there are plenty of cases where contributions from citizens can highlight new problems that need addressing, new perspectives by which issues are understood, and new ideas for solving public problems—from administrative agencies seeking public input to city governments seeking to resolve resident complaints and citizens’ assemblies deliberating on climate policy. But even in these and other contexts, there is reason to doubt AI’s usefulness across the board. The possibilities of AI for civic engagement depend crucially on what exactly it is that policymakers want to learn from the public. For some types of learning, applications of AI can make major contributions to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of information processing. For others, there is no getting around the fundamental needs for human attention and context-specific knowledge in order to adequately make sense of public voices. We need to better understand these differences to avoid wasting resources on tools that might not deliver useful information…(More)”.
People-centred and participatory policymaking
Blog by the UK Policy Lab: “…Different policies can play out in radically different ways depending on circumstance and place. Accordingly it is important for policy professionals to have access to a diverse suite of people-centred methods, from gentle and compassionate techniques that increase understanding with small groups of people to higher-profile, larger-scale engagements. The image below shows a spectrum of people-centred and participatory methods that can be used in policy, ranging from light-touch involvement (e.g. consultation), to structured deliberation (e.g. citizens’ assemblies) and deeper collaboration and empowerment (e.g. participatory budgeting). This spectrum of participation is speculatively mapped against stages of the policy cycle…(More)”.
Social Innovation and the Journey to Transformation
Special series by Skoll for the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…we explore system orchestration, collaborative funding, government partnerships, mission-aligned investing, reimagined storytelling, and evaluation and learning. These seven articles highlight successful approaches to collective action and share compelling examples of social transformation.
The time is now for philanthropy to align the speed and scale of our investments with the scope of the global challenges that social innovators seek to address. We hope this series will spark fresh thinking and new ideas for how we can create durable systemic change quickly and together…(More)”.
From Digital Sovereignty to Digital Agency
Article by Akash Kapur: “In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued variants of digital sovereignty to regulate and control the global digital ecosystem. The pursuit of AI sovereignty represents the latest iteration in this quest.
Digital sovereignty may offer certain benefits, but it also poses undeniable risks, including the possibility of undermining the very goals of autonomy and self-reliance that nations are seeking. These risks are particularly pronounced for smaller nations with less capacity, which might do better in a revamped, more inclusive, multistakeholder system of digital governance.
Organizing digital governance around agency rather than sovereignty offers the possibility of such a system. Rather than reinforce the primacy of nations, digital agency asserts the rights, priorities, and needs not only of sovereign governments but also of the constituent parts—the communities and individuals—they purport to represent.
Three cross-cutting principles underlie the concept of digital agency: recognizing stakeholder multiplicity, enhancing the latent possibilities of technology, and promoting collaboration. These principles lead to three action-areas that offer a guide for digital policymakers: reinventing institutions, enabling edge technologies, and building human capacity to ensure technical capacity…(More)”.
How public-private partnerships can ensure ethical, sustainable and inclusive AI development
Article by Rohan Sharma: “Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve some of today’s most pressing societal challenges – from climate change to healthcare disparities – but it could also exacerbate existing inequalities if not developed and deployed responsibly.
The rapid pace of AI development, growing awareness of AI’s societal impact and the urgent need to harness AI for positive change make bridging the ‘AI divide’ essential now. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) can play a crucial role in ensuring AI is developed ethically, sustainably and inclusively by leveraging the strengths of multiple stakeholders across sectors and regions…
To bridge the AI divide effectively, collaboration among governments, private companies, civil society and other stakeholders is crucial. PPPs unite these stakeholders’ strengths to ensure AI is developed ethically, sustainably, and inclusively.
1. Bridging the resource and expertise gap
By combining public oversight and private innovation, PPPs bridge resource and expertise gaps. Governments offer funding, regulations and access to public data; companies contribute technical expertise, creativity and market solutions. This collaboration accelerates AI technologies for social good.
Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0, for instance, exemplifies how PPPs drive ethical AI development. By bringing together over one hundred experts from academia, industry and government, Singapore is building a trusted AI ecosystem focused on global challenges like health and climate change. Empowering citizens and businesses to use AI responsibly, Singapore demonstrates how PPPs create inclusive AI systems, serving as a model for others.
2. Fostering cross-border collaboration
AI development is a global endeavour, but countries vary in expertise and resources. PPPs facilitate international knowledge sharing, technology transfer and common ethical standards, ensuring AI benefits are distributed globally, rather than concentrated in a few regions or companies.
3. Ensuring multi-stakeholder engagement
Inclusive AI development requires involving not just public and private sectors, but also civil society organizations and local communities. Engaging these groups in PPPs brings diverse perspectives to AI design and deployment, integrating ethical, social and cultural considerations from the start.
These approaches underscore the value of PPPs in driving AI development through diverse expertise, shared resources and international collaboration…(More)”.
Engaging publics in science: a practical typology
Paper by Heather Douglas et al: “Public engagement with science has become a prominent area of research and effort for democratizing science. In the fall of 2020, we held an online conference, Public Engagement with Science: Defining and Measuring Success, to address questions of how to do public engagement well. The conference was organized around conceptualizations of the publics engaged, with attendant epistemic, ethical, and political valences. We present here the typology of publics we used (volunteer, representative sample, stakeholder, and community publics), discuss the differences among those publics and what those differences mean for practice, and situate this typology within the existing work on public engagement with science. We then provide an overview of the essays published in this journal arising from the conference which provides a window into the rich work presented at the event…(More)”.
Mini-publics and the public: challenges and opportunities
Conversation between Sarah Castell and Stephen Elstub: “…there’s a real problem here: the public are only going to get to know about a mini-public if it gets media coverage, but the media will only cover it if it makes an impact. But it’s more likely to make an impact if the public are aware of it. That’s a tension that mini-publics need to overcome, because it’s important that they reach out to the public. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how inclusive the recruitment is and how well it’s done. It doesn’t matter how well designed the process is. It is still a small number of people involved, so we want mini-publics to be able to influence public opinion and stimulate public debate. And if they can do that, then it’s more likely to affect elite opinion and debate as well, and possibly policy.
One more thing is that, people in power aren’t in the habit of sharing power. And that’s why it’s very difficult. I think the politicians are mainly motivated around this because they hope it’s going to look good to the electorate and get them some votes, but they are also worried about low levels of trust in society and what the ramifications of that might be. But in general, people in power don’t give it away very easily…
Part of the problem is that a lot of the research around public views on deliberative processes was done through experiments. It is useful, but it doesn’t quite tell us what will happen when mini-publics are communicated to the public in the messy real public sphere. Previously, there just weren’t that many well-known cases that we could actually do field research on. But that is starting to change.
There’s also more interdisciplinary work needed in this area. We need to improve how communication strategies around citizens’ assembly are done – there must be work that’s relevant in political communication studies and other fields who have this kind of insight…(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)”
We Need To Talk About Climate: How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Help Us Solve The Climate Crisis
Book by Graham Smith: “Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision-making. How might they help us address the climate crisis? The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant effects on citizens’ lives. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly. Climate assemblies show us how this can be done.
This book explains the variety of climate assemblies that have taken place so far at local, national and international levels and explains why they have captured the imagination of government and activists alike. It examines the different contexts and designs of climate assemblies and assesses their impact. Drawing lessons from current practice, the book demonstrates how assemblies can take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics and how they can have a real and lasting impact on climate policy and politics…(More)”.