I’m a journalist researching and writing about democratic reforms that would counterweight or constrain populism. The more I delve into this the more it seems like an urgent priority. I think the incentive structure created by today’s media-political environment encourages politicians like Trump to become more populist and that leads to lower quality governance, with visibly much less well informed people in charge.
But governance increasingly seems like an AI problem to me. If super intelligence is coming quickly it will radically increase the power of some governments (eg US) and could cause existing power structures to ossify. If politicians in charge have bad priorities or incentives, they could use AI to make the world much worse instead of much better. We may be running out of time to fix these incentives.
Reform in my mind means far greater citizen participation, using a mix of online platforms, “alignment assemblies” (online citizens assemblies + deliberation, but much faster and cheaper), sortition for citizen observers of government at all scales, and other ways to depolarise debate, build trust, and find consensus. A Tang-derived ambitious digital democracy.
But this is a surprisingly neglected problem, with comparatively tiny resources devoted to it, especially in comparison to the huge heft behind algorithms like those on social media which distort political debate.
Does this very rough sketch of my argument seem reasonable? Is this the sort of project EA orgs might fund some research on? If so, how could I contribute to that effort?
I’m a journalist researching and writing about democratic reforms that would counterweight or constrain populism. The more I delve into this the more it seems like an urgent priority. I think the incentive structure created by today’s media-political environment encourages politicians like Trump to become more populist and that leads to lower quality governance, with visibly much less well informed people in charge.
But governance increasingly seems like an AI problem to me. If super intelligence is coming quickly it will radically increase the power of some governments (eg US) and could cause existing power structures to ossify. If politicians in charge have bad priorities or incentives, they could use AI to make the world much worse instead of much better. We may be running out of time to fix these incentives.
Reform in my mind means far greater citizen participation, using a mix of online platforms, “alignment assemblies” (online citizens assemblies + deliberation, but much faster and cheaper), sortition for citizen observers of government at all scales, and other ways to depolarise debate, build trust, and find consensus. A Tang-derived ambitious digital democracy.
But this is a surprisingly neglected problem, with comparatively tiny resources devoted to it, especially in comparison to the huge heft behind algorithms like those on social media which distort political debate.
Does this very rough sketch of my argument seem reasonable? Is this the sort of project EA orgs might fund some research on? If so, how could I contribute to that effort?