News in the Category "Book Reviews"

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Algorithmic Optimism, Democratic Reality

A review of Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders, Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (The MIT Press, 2025).

  • Lawfare
  • December 19, 2025

It is telling that when admitted artificial intelligence (AI) optimists write a book about how AI can have a significant positive impact on democracy, they want their readers to know they did not use AI to help them write their book. That is exactly what Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders do in Rewiring Democracy: “While we see many useful applications of AI, we wrote this book ourselves. All the ideas and words are our own or stemming from those we have cited or acknowledged.” It’s a revealing disclaimer. If AI holds as much promise to enhance productivity, creativity, and fairness as the authors insist, why not enlist it in the act of authorship? Implicitly, Schneier and Sanders’s disclaimer suggests that despite AI’s speed and scope, there remains something distinctly human—perhaps even superior—about thought unassisted by AI…

The Best Information Security Books of 2025

  • Ben Rothke
  • Medium
  • December 15, 2025

Excerpt

As the year ends, here is my list of the Best Information Security Books of 2025.

Information security book of the year—Rewiring Democracy

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphical model that represents the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. It has five phases: innovation trigger, peak of inflated expectations, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, and plateau of productivity. It is designed to help organizations assess the potential risks and benefits of new technologies.

When it comes to hype, nothing compares to AI. Yet even with all the hype, there is still immeasurable value. In …

Closing the Year With the Books That Framed the Future

  • Lily Morris
  • The National CIO Review
  • December 8, 2025

Excerpt

As the year winds down, it feels like the right moment to look at the ideas that have influenced discussions about technology, leadership, and the changing demands on modern organizations.

The books in this roundup approach these themes in different ways.

Some explore how AI is used in real work, while others examine cybersecurity and the decisions that shape team environments.

Together, they offer a useful set of perspectives for anyone curious about the forces guiding the next stage of work and society.

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship…

Book Review: Rewiring Democracy Offers a Nuanced Examination of AI’s Impact on Our Civic and Social Fabric

Readers need not be computer science graduates to understand the critical points being made. The result is a book that speaks to policymakers, civic technologists, and public servants without burying them in jargon.

  • Samuel Ross
  • The Cascadia Advocate
  • December 7, 2025

Artificial intelligence has become perhaps the top buzzword of the decade. It has become impossible to walk a block without hearing an ad, seeing a sign on a bus, or eavesdropping into a conversation without noting the presence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, or an offering from a  Silicon Valley startup.

Evident in the latest round of layoffs in greater Seattle, eager Big Tech executives are plowing ahead on a dangerous course they’ve charted. It is exhausting to find ourselves, once again, being sold every moment of our lives by a faceless corporation…

How AI Could Save Democracy Instead of Destroying It

  • Ellsworth Toohey
  • Boing Boing
  • December 4, 2025

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders are asking the right question in their new book Rewiring Democracy: not whether AI will change politics, but how we can shape that change. The cybersecurity expert (behind Data and Goliath) and data scientist tackle something most AI discussions skip entirely—the nitty-gritty of democratic governance.

Their timing couldn’t be better. AI is already being used to draft legislation, analyze court documents, and run local political campaigns (most politics happens at low budgets, they point out, where AI tools can level the playing field for first-time candidates). The authors argue that AI amplifies power—and the crucial question is whose power gets amplified…

Agentic AI Could Improve Everything or Cascade into Doom

  • Gideon Lichfield
  • Bloomberg
  • November 24, 2025

After days of chaos, hundreds of deaths and trillions of dollars wiped off stock markets, the Great Agentic Cascade of July 2028 turned out to have begun much like the great internet outages of October and November 2025: with a minor bug at a major provider on which many of the world’s biggest internet services depended to manage their traffic. But in the intervening three years, the world had gone all-in on agentic AI—systems that can make and carry out decisions without human intervention. Many internet companies had created AI agents that automatically spun up servers at alternative cloud firms when their main service went down. That was their, and the world’s, undoing…

AI Has a Democracy Problem—Here’s Why

A thorough examination of artificial intelligence’s promise in politics rests on a thorny premise: democracy is an information system.

  • Virginia Eubanks
  • Nature
  • November 18, 2025

Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders MIT Press (2025)

The tsunami of writing on artificial intelligence tends towards either bald hype or panicked dystopianism. Proponents say that AI will revolutionize health care, drive business growth and become our new best friend. But for its critics, AI could cause massive unemployment, perpetuate fake news and pose an extinction risk to humankind.

In Rewiring Democracy, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier and data scientist Nathan Sanders offer a welcome middle path by focusing on practical politics. In a heartfelt, if workmanlike, way, they craft a framework for maximizing the democratic potential of AI. Yet, by shrinking and distorting the vexing political challenges that the world faces today to fit a single solution—AI—they short-change the frustrating glories of living together as human beings…

Ben’s Book of the Month: Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Rothke
  • RSA Conference
  • November 4, 2025

At the Infosec World 2025 conference last week, AI dominated discussions and vendor displays. One sparsely attended speaker joked that including AI in the title of his talk would have drawn a larger crowd.

When I heard about Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (MIT Press) by Bruce Schneier and Dr. Nathan Sanders, I expected a harsh critique of AI’s impact on democracy, but the book instead presents a nuanced thesis on how AI will transform, rather than simply threaten, our political systems…

Rewiring Democracy (But Not Too Much)—a Book Review

  • Malcolm Murray
  • 3 Quarks Daily
  • October 17, 2025

I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship—a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.

The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI—AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity…

Review of Rewiring Democracy

  • Ben Shneiderman
  • Human-Centered AI Google Group
  • October 9, 2025

Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders have been working on Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship (The MIT Press, Oct. 21, 2025). Their broad-ranging review imagines the many ways AI will impact politicians, legislators, administrators, jurists, and citizens. Their example-packed analyses, with calls to action, are largely hope-filled, with comments such as: “Despite the fantasies of some, we don;t anticipate that AIs will replace the humans who perform these tasks anytime soon. Nonetheless, over time, we expect that AI will make civil servants more effective at their jobs, and democracy more responsive to its constituents. Administrators and policymakers need to ensure that these efficiencies make government serve people better and more equitably.” They believe that: “Security is the biggest major barrier to using AI in democratic applications that no one seems to be talking about.” In general, Schneier and Sanders expect positive outcomes from AI implementations, but wisely warn of dangers: “If our goal is to ensure that AI generally benefits democracy rather than harms it, then we have a lot of work to do.” Their forward-looking scenarios mean that they repeatedly use words like: could, should, must, and can. They close with 7 organizing principles, such as “AI tools must be made widely available” and “AI developers and tools must be transparent.” Then they offer 4 paths such as promoting “responsible use of AI in society” so that “we may just be able to use this technology to rewire democracy to better serve all of us.” Overall, a valuable, wise, and balanced contribution in non-technical terms that will be welcomed by the five communities they address, and I hope the researchers and developers who could produce the happier outcomes the authors seek…

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.