News in the Category "Rewiring Democracy"

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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…

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.