I’m exploring writing a book about upgrading democracy in time to mitigate governance problems caused by the rise of AI. Would appreciate feedback on framing, related work, and potential collaborators/funders.
My core thesis is that our democratic systems were built for the 19th century, and are structurally unsuited for the speed, globalism, and disintermediation of 21st-century communication.
I think the consequences – populism, creeping authoritarianism – are already visible in the poor performance of many democracies today. I worry things will get much, much worse as AI grows more powerful. Like Will MacAskill I think there’s a solid chance that AGI will mean the end of democracies as we know them.
I also think we’re already evolving towards more participatory and deliberative systems, leveraging the internet – but that this transition is far too slow. We have the technology to design a sophisticated set of platforms and systems that empower citizens and embed mass deliberation into the heart of democratic decision-making.
I aim to spotlight experiments in this direction in Taiwan and elsewhere to show the promise of giving citizens more responsibility alongside information.
Citizens assemblies alone show that people who have thought and talked about an issue in a structured way come to very different conclusions than those who consume media casually, at the margins of busy lives. E.g. a representative (majority Leave-voting) assembly in the UK around 2016 decided they’d rather stay in the EU than leave without customs union. Unsurprisingly, almost ten years later, a supermajority of Britons don’t think we should have left at all.
In the coming decades we may not be able to afford such own goals.
My rough plan is to research and write a relatively lean book on these subjects, with room for agnosticism on the plausibility of near-term AGI and the specific solutions to it. The idea is that given how important this is, as a meta-problem upstream of virtually all political decision-making, it is actually hugely neglected. If we could apply a fraction of the funding devoted to say designing and A/B testing social media platforms to engineering such a platform for digital democracy, we might make the world more resilient to almost any future crisis imaginable.
Does this sound plausible and valuable? Do you have any advice for collaborating/networking with EA people and EA orgs, and potentially applying for small-grant funding, on the same front? Is there existing work on this topic that I might not be aware of?
About me: I’m a journalist and documentary filmmaker (Novara Media, Documentary Magazine) currently finishing a short doc project.
“Fix Democracy First”—potential book?
I’m exploring writing a book about upgrading democracy in time to mitigate governance problems caused by the rise of AI. Would appreciate feedback on framing, related work, and potential collaborators/funders.
My core thesis is that our democratic systems were built for the 19th century, and are structurally unsuited for the speed, globalism, and disintermediation of 21st-century communication.
I think the consequences – populism, creeping authoritarianism – are already visible in the poor performance of many democracies today. I worry things will get much, much worse as AI grows more powerful. Like Will MacAskill I think there’s a solid chance that AGI will mean the end of democracies as we know them.
I also think we’re already evolving towards more participatory and deliberative systems, leveraging the internet – but that this transition is far too slow. We have the technology to design a sophisticated set of platforms and systems that empower citizens and embed mass deliberation into the heart of democratic decision-making.
I aim to spotlight experiments in this direction in Taiwan and elsewhere to show the promise of giving citizens more responsibility alongside information.
Citizens assemblies alone show that people who have thought and talked about an issue in a structured way come to very different conclusions than those who consume media casually, at the margins of busy lives. E.g. a representative (majority Leave-voting) assembly in the UK around 2016 decided they’d rather stay in the EU than leave without customs union. Unsurprisingly, almost ten years later, a supermajority of Britons don’t think we should have left at all.
In the coming decades we may not be able to afford such own goals.
My rough plan is to research and write a relatively lean book on these subjects, with room for agnosticism on the plausibility of near-term AGI and the specific solutions to it. The idea is that given how important this is, as a meta-problem upstream of virtually all political decision-making, it is actually hugely neglected. If we could apply a fraction of the funding devoted to say designing and A/B testing social media platforms to engineering such a platform for digital democracy, we might make the world more resilient to almost any future crisis imaginable.
Does this sound plausible and valuable? Do you have any advice for collaborating/networking with EA people and EA orgs, and potentially applying for small-grant funding, on the same front? Is there existing work on this topic that I might not be aware of?
About me: I’m a journalist and documentary filmmaker (Novara Media, Documentary Magazine) currently finishing a short doc project.