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)”.