News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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AI Book Review: Rewiring Democracy
A clear-eyed look at how AI is already reshaping the machinery of democracy – and what it will take to keep power in public hands.
I spend a great deal of my time reading books on technology and artificial intelligence, not just as research for my work, but because I am genuinely curious about how power and responsibility are shifting in this new era. Some books focus on business efficiency, others on looming catastrophe.
Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship is interested in something more specific and, in many ways, more urgent: how AI is being woven into the everyday workings of democracy. Schneier and Sanders are not writing science fiction; they are mapping changes already underway, and asking whether citizens will shape these systems – or merely be shaped by them…
Rewiring Democracy: “Citizen Acceptance and Trust in AI Matters as Much as AI Capabilities”
The core message of this book is succinctly captured in one sentence on page 100: “citizen acceptance and trust in AI matters as much as AI capabilities”. There is a lot more covered in Rewiring Democracy that sits behind this statement—the fact that much of our acceptance of artificial intelligence is unwilling or unwitting, and the universal truth that trust is hard won and easily lost.
There are widely opposing views of AI across the political spectrum, and how it will be applied in Irish society. While some see it as a boost for Ireland’s competitiveness, others have concerns about …
How Artificial Intelligence Is Rewiring Democracy
Excerpt
Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders (MIT Press, 2025)
Can an artificial intelligence model run for mayor? In 2024, a Cheyenne, Wyoming, mayoral candidate tried to make that case when he pledged that if he were elected, he’d outsource all decisions to an AI. He came in a distant fourth, earning only 3 percent of the vote.
But that (to my mind, rather dystopian) example explored in Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship…
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).
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.