Reimagining Democracy for AI

Issue Date October 2023
Volume 34
Issue 4
Page Numbers 162–170
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AI advances are shattering assumptions that both our democracies and our international order rely on. Reinventing our “democratic infrastructure” is thus critically necessary—and the author argues that it is also possible. Four interconnected and accelerating democratic paradigm shifts illustrate the potential: representative deliberations, AI augmentation, democracy-as-a-service, and platform democracy. Such innovations provide a viable path toward not just reimagining traditional democracies but enabling the transnational and even global democratic processes critical for addressing the broader challenges posed by destabilizing AI advances—including those relating to AI alignment and global agreements. We can and must rapidly invest in such democratic innovation if we are to ensure that our democratic capacity increases with our power.

About the Author

Aviv Ovadya is a research fellow at newDemocracy; an affiliate at the Centre for the Governance of AI, the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and the Safra Center for Ethics’s GETTING-Plurality research network; and a founder of the AI & Democracy Foundation. His work focuses primarily on ensuring that the governance of AI can keep up with the rate of AI advances.

View all work by Aviv Ovadya

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