How AI Can Help Democracy Work Better
episode
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
30 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 5 months ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Today on the AI Daily Brief, how AI can help democracy work better. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy, and Super Intelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
How is AI influencing political discourse today?
If you are interested in sponsoring the show or want to know really anything else about the broader AIDB ecosystem, check it out at aidallybrief.ai. All the fun things we've got cooking are always going to be listed there. Now today we are doing something which I hope to be able to do a lot more of in the months to come. It is quite clear at this point that AI is rising in significance as a broader societal and political issue. More and more people are understanding that it's going to impact them at work, impacts at work are understood to be impacts on the economy, and things that impact the economy are understood to be political inherently, whether we'd like them to be or not. Now, in this climate, a lot of the reactions and emergent political discourse is quite negative.
It's increased chatter about x-risk, declarations and proposals for moratoriums on data centers. And even among those who reject those policies, it sometimes feels like every day a new politician pulls a new number out of a hat to get press for how many people they think that AI is going to employ. And yet, believe it or not, not everyone is so dreary about what AI can mean for the world. I think it's likely that as the negative discourse increases, we also start to see some voices emerge who are telling a different story. Now, as you well know, we have these long reads slash big think type episodes every weekend, which is a great chance to highlight some of those voices. Today, we are doing a good old-fashioned actual long read, reading a piece from Stanford professor Andy Hall.
Andy wrote an essay that we are going to read a number of excerpts from called Building Political Superintelligence. and he introduced it on Twitter in this way. He writes, Amidst understandable concerns of AI dystopia, no one is offering a positive vision for how we can use AI to remake our institutions and reinvent how we govern. That's what I try to offer today. My argument is that we need an explicit research agenda to build political superintelligence. The window for building these structures is narrow, and the right response is not to slow AI down, but to speed up how fast we build the institutions that keep us free as AI grows more powerful. He ends his tweet with the quote that actually begins his essay.
As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, we have it in our power to begin the world over again. So let's read what Andy is arguing about how we should think about the opportunity for AI and, as he calls it, political superintelligence. Andy writes, Right now is a weird time to be a political economist. AI is straining our already brittle political institutions. We might lurch into a dystopia in which we live in the grips of a techno-leviathan, forced by our employers to train our own AI replacements, then kick to the curb in a society organized to the benefit of a tiny number of people who control the machinery that controls the world. It's also an electric time to be a political economist. With each new paper my lab puts out, and with each new experimental prototype and self-governance we build using tools we couldn't have imagined having even a year ago, I'm starting to believe that AI presents an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild our society so we can keep slouching down the narrow corridor towards utopia.
Condorcet was an 18th century political economist and mathematician who, in his outlines of a historical view of the progress of the human mind, traced the Enlightenment and the rise of modern democracy straight back to printed books. For, quote, they had opened so many doors to truth, which it was impossible ever to close again.
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