Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.
We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better.
Here are four such stories unfolding right now around the world, showing how AI is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to people.
Japan
Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in fifth in a crowded field of 56, largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign innovators worldwide.
Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, again leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents–this time answering more than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan’s public funding for political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to organize those expressions using AI. The party promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input.
Brazil
Brazil is notoriously litigious, with even more lawyers per capita than the US. The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog costs the government billions to process. Estimates are that the Brazilian federal government spends about 1.6% of GDP per year operating the courts and another 2.5% to 3% of GDP issuing court-ordered payments from lawsuits the government has lost.
Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme…
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