AI and Democracy

Thomas B. Edsall, Will A.I. Be a Creator or a Destroyer of Worlds? NYTimes, June 5, 2024. The first 2/3s is about AI and work. I'm appending the last third, which is about AI and politics, below the asterisks.

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In his 2023 article “Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: A Conceptual Framework,” Andreas Jungherr, a political scientist at the University of Bamberg in Germany, maintains that “A.I. has begun to touch the very idea and practice of democracy.”

In the competition between democratic and autocratic states, Jungherr argues that artificial intelligence can help authoritarian leaders: “A.I. in autocracies creates an environment of permissive privacy regulation that provides developers and modelers with vast troves of data, allowing them to refine A.I.-enabled models of human behavior.”

Traditionally, Jungherr writes,

Democracies have been seen to be superior to autocracies due to their superior performance as information aggregators and processors. Free expression, a free press, and electorally channeled competition between factions provide democracies with structural mechanisms that surface information about society, the actions of bureaucracies, and the impact of policies. In contrast, autocracies restrict information flows by controlling speech, the media and political competition, leaving governments in the dark regarding local situations.

Artificial intelligence, Jungherr suggests, may enable “autocracies to overcome this disadvantage. The clearest example at present is China, which uses large-scale data collection and A.I. to support social planning and control — such as through its Social Credit System.”

Along these lines, artificial intelligence could provide authoritarian leaders access to the needs and views of their constituents, helping “autocracies increase their state capacities through A.I.-assisted governance and planning, increasing the quality of state-provided public services.”

If performed effectively and accurately, improved public services “might provide people living in autocracies with greater cultural, economic and health-related opportunities,” Jungherr writes, which, in turn, would encourage people to “see these benefits as a worthy trade-off with some individual freedoms, leading to strengthened public support for autocracies and state control.”

In examining the effect of artificial intelligence on politics, especially politics in this country, Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for internet & Society and a lecturer at the Kennedy School, takes speculation to a new level.

In an essay that was published last week, “How A.I. Will Change Democracy,” Schneier writes:

A.I. can engage with voters, conduct polls and fundraise at a scale that humans cannot — for all sizes of elections. More interestingly, future politicians will largely be A.I.-driven. I don’t mean that AI will replace humans as politicians. But as A.I. starts to look and feel more human, our human politicians will start to look and feel more like A.I.

Artificial intelligence, Schneier believes, will shift power from executives — presidents and governors — to Congress and to state legislators:

Right now, laws tend to be general, with details to be worked out by a government agency. A.I. can allow legislators to propose, and then vote on, all of those details. That will change the balance of power between the legislative and the executive branches of government.

And finally, Schneier writes, taking his case a step further, “A.I. can eliminate the need for politicians.”

The system of representative democracy, he continues, “empowers elected officials to stand in for our collective preferences.” When the issues involved complex trade-offs, “we can only choose one of two — or maybe a few more — candidates to do that for us.”

Artificial intelligence, Schneier asserts, “can change this. We can imagine a personal A.I. directly participating in policy debates on our behalf, along with millions of other personal A.I.s, and coming to a consensus on policy.”

This consensus will be reached, Schneier maintains, by combining the data contained in devices he calls “personal A.I. assistants.”

These “assistants” according to Schneier, serve

as your advocate with others, and as a butler with you. This requires an intimacy greater than your search engine, email provider, cloud storage system, or phone. You’re going to want it with you 24/7, constantly training on everything you do. You will want it to know everything about you, so it can most effectively work on your behalf.

A.I. has revealed unfathomable vistas, as well as ungraspable, unrecognizable vulnerabilities — and the process has only just begun.