I’m exploring writing a book about upgrading democracy in time to mitigate governance problems caused by the rise of AI. Would appreciate feedback on framing, related work, and potential collaborators/funders.
My core thesis is that our democratic systems were built for the 19th century, and are structurally unsuited for the speed, globalism, and disintermediation of 21st-century communication.
I think the consequences – populism, creeping authoritarianism – are already visible in the poor performance of many democracies today. I worry things will get much, much worse as AI grows more powerful. Like Will MacAskill I think there's a solid chance that AGI will mean the end of democracies as we know them.
I also think we're already evolving towards more participatory and deliberative systems, leveraging the internet – but that this transition is far too slow. We have the technology to design a sophisticated set of platforms and systems that empower citizens and embed mass deliberation into the heart of democratic decision-making.
I aim to spotlight experiments in this direction in Taiwan and elsewhere to show the promise of giving citizens more responsibility alongside information.
Citizens assemblies alone show that people who have thought and talked about an issue in a structured way come to very different conclusions than those who consume media casually, at the margins of busy lives. E.g. a representative (majority Leave-voting) assembly in the UK around 2016 decided they'd rather stay in the EU than leave without customs union. Unsurprisingly, almost ten years later, a supermajority of Britons don't think we should have left at all.
In the coming decades we may not be able to afford such own goals.Â
My rough plan is to research and write a relatively lean book on these subjects, with room for agnosticism on the plausibility of near-term AGI and the specific solutions to it. The idea is that given how important this is, as a meta-problem upstream of virtually all political decision-making, it is actually hugely neglected. If we could apply a fraction of the funding devoted to say designing and A/B testing social media platforms to engineering such a platform for digital democracy, we might make the world more resilient to almost any future crisis imaginable.
Does this sound plausible and valuable? Do you have any advice for collaborating/networking with EA people and EA orgs, and potentially applying for small-grant funding, on the same front? Is there existing work on this topic that I might not be aware of?
About me: I’m a journalist and documentary filmmaker (Novara Media, Documentary Magazine) currently finishing a short doc project.
Hey nice! AGI and improvements to representative democracy systems are both right up my alley!
That said, I think the AGI tie in might seem kind of superficial in that having more functional governance and societal coordination mechanisms would help with all sorts of stuff so I think it makes sense to frame this reasonably in a reasonably AGI timeline agnostic sort of way. That said, ya, I see your point that this sort of thing is made all the more dire when thrown into relief by our "time of troubles" and "longtermists on the precipice" style thinking. Your call here, but I am sure it is not necessary to believe random "LLMs will change the world" predictions to believe that certain democratic reforms make sense.
In my experience, a lot of people in online EA spaces are pretty willing to talk to you if you reach out, so I think you'll have decent luck there if that's what you're after. Not as confident about how to find more serious collaborators for a project like this.
A few ideas I would throw out there for the sake of brainstorming (many or all of which you may already be familiar with):
Also, I definitely second the idea of using a citizen's assembly. In my opinion, the power of random sampling + time to learn about and focus on an issue is really OP and really under utilized by representative democracies. The statistical mathematics around approximating large populations with small random samples are really underutilized here and working in our favor. Honestly, there is tons of adverse selection in the electoral process (eg. this book deals with some elements of that).Â
If you haven't seen CGP Grey's "Politics in the Animal Kingdom" series, you might love it! Also the Forward Party in the US tends to push for similar ideas / platforms, so they might be worth checking out.
I think this kind of work is very valuable! Nation states might yet be the death of us. It has been terrible watch the democratic backsliding and corruption in my own US of A (in fact I will be one of the protestors this 10/18 No Kings Day). Plus, I agree with your sentiment that there is a lot of headroom. Personally, I think this has less to do with the rise of cyberspace and more to do with the fact that existing polities were just never particularly optimized around the sorts of ideals we are aspiring towards here. Classical Age Greece and the revolutionary United States were both slave states with a lot of backwards ideas after all.