AIWhat If We Used AI to Strengthen Democracy?

By Liz Mineo

AI is just the latest technology in a long line of innovations through history that have influenced politics. While many experts fear artificial intelligence will be deployed to weaken democracy, examples abound around the world of it being used to make systems fairer.

“We talk about AI being used as a tool of surveillance, as a tool of control, as a tool of propaganda,” said security technologist Bruce Schneier, co-author of the new book “Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship.” “These are all possible scenarios, but AI can also be used to resist all those things.”

In this interview, which has been edited for clarity and length, the lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School talks about AI’s potential impact on the democratic process, and the need to both regulate it and create a public option to offset the power of private companies.

In your book, you write that democracy is an information system and because of that, it will be affected by AI. Can you explain?
When we say that democracy is an information system, what we mean is that it’s a way of figuring out what people want to do in some fair manner and what a country’s policies should be. It takes information about what people want and combines it together, and the output is some set of policy, some set of actions. AI technology fundamentally processes information, and that is why it’s going to affect democracy. This isn’t new. Democracy has been affected by technology since its beginning. You could think about the voting booth. You can think about the train, television, the internet; all of these things have affected democracy, and AI technology will affect democracy like everything else did.