Essays in the Category "Democracy"
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Public AI as an Alternative to Corporate AI
This essay appeared as part of a round table on “Power and Governance in the Age of AI.”
The increasingly centralized control of AI is an ominous sign. When tech billionaires and corporations steer AI, we get AI that tends to reflect the interests of tech billionaires and corporations, instead of the public. Given how transformative this technology will be for the world, this is a problem.
To benefit society as a whole we need an AI public option—not to replace corporate AI but to serve as a counterbalance—as well as stronger democratic institutions to govern all of AI. Like public roads and the federal postal system, a public AI option could guarantee universal access to this transformative technology and set an implicit standard that private services must surpass to compete…
Let’s Not Make the Same Mistakes with AI That We Made with Social Media
Social media’s unregulated evolution over the past decade holds a lot of lessons that apply directly to AI companies and technologies.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening of our political discourse, the spread of misinformation, and the increase in partisan polarization.
Today, tech’s darling is artificial intelligence. Like social media, it has the potential to change the world in many ways, some favorable to democracy. But at the same time, it has the potential to do incredible damage to society…
How Public AI Can Strengthen Democracy
With the world’s focus turning to misinformation, manipulation, and outright propaganda ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we know that democracy has an AI problem. But we’re learning that AI has a democracy problem, too. Both challenges must be addressed for the sake of democratic governance and public protection.
Just three Big Tech firms (Microsoft, Google, and Amazon) control about two-thirds of the global market for the cloud computing resources used to train and deploy AI models. They have a lot of the AI talent, the capacity for large-scale innovation, and face few public regulations for their products and activities…
AI Could Improve Your Life by Removing Bottlenecks between What You Want and What You Get
Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.
Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.
AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar…
Ten Ways AI Will Change Democracy
In a new essay, Harvard Kennedy School’s Bruce Schneier goes beyond AI-generated disinformation to detail other novel ways in which AI might alter how democracy functions.
Artificial intelligence will change so many aspects of society, largely in ways that we cannot conceive of yet. Democracy, and the systems of governance that surround it, will be no exception. In this short essay, I want to move beyond the “AI-generated disinformation” trope and speculate on some of the ways AI will change how democracy functions—in both large and small ways.
When I survey how artificial intelligence might upend different aspects of modern society, democracy included, I look at four different dimensions of change: speed, scale, scope, and sophistication. Look for places where changes in degree result in changes of kind. Those are where the societal upheavals will happen…
Who’s Accountable for AI Usage in Digital Campaign Ads? Right Now, No One.
In a new essay, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders argue that AI is poised to dramatically ramp up digital campaigns and outline how accountability measures across platforms, government, and the media can curb risks.
If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns (even more) off the rails.
At issue is whether candidates using AI to create deepfaked media for political advertisements should be considered fraud or legitimate electioneering. That is, is it allowable to use AI image generators to create photorealistic images depicting Trump hugging Anthony Fauci? And is it allowable to use …
Re-Imagining Democracy for the 21st Century, Possibly Without the Trappings of the 18th Century
This essay was also published by Chron, Phys.org, and UPI.
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the U.S. or any other country. We don’t have any special or unique interests to perturb our thinking.
How would we govern ourselves?
It’s unlikely that we would use the systems we have today. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government that mid-18th-century technology could conceive of. The 21st century is a different place scientifically, technically and socially…
Six Ways That AI Could Change Politics
A new era of AI-powered domestic politics may be coming. Watch for these milestones to know when it’s arrived.
This essay also appeared in The Economic Times.
ChatGPT was released just nine months ago, and we are still learning how it will affect our daily lives, our careers, and even our systems of self-governance.
But when it comes to how AI may threaten our democracy, much of the public conversation lacks imagination. People talk about the danger of campaigns that attack opponents with fake images (or fake audio or video) because we already have decades of experience dealing with doctored images. We’re on the lookout for foreign governments that spread misinformation because we were traumatized by the 2016 US presidential election. And we worry that AI-generated opinions will swamp the political preferences of real people because we’ve seen political “astroturfing”—the use of fake online accounts to give the illusion of support for a policy—grow for decades…
Will AI Hack Our Democracy?
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Back in 2021, I wrote an essay titled “The Coming AI Hackers,” about how AI would hack our political, economic, and social systems. That ended up being a theme of my latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, and is something I have continued to think and write about.
I believe that AI will hack public policy in a way unlike anything that’s come before. It will change the speed, scale, scope, and sophistication of hacking, which in turn will change so many things that we can’t even imagine how it will all shake out. At a minimum, everything about public policy—how it is crafted, how it is implemented, what effects it has on individuals—will change in ways we cannot foresee…
AI Could Shore Up Democracy—Here’s One Way
This essay also appeared in ArcaMax, Big News Network, Biloxi Local News & Events, Chicago Sun-Times, Fast Company, GCN, Government Technology, Inkl, Macau Daily Times, MENAFN, Nextgov, and Yahoo.
It’s become fashionable to think of artificial intelligence as an inherently dehumanizing technology, a ruthless force of automation that has unleashed legions of virtual skilled laborers in faceless form. But what if AI turns out to be the one tool able to identify what makes your ideas special, recognizing your unique perspective and potential on the issues where it matters most?…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.