Governance of AI, with AI, through deliberative democracy

How can we govern the impacts of technology, at the necessary speed and scale, in a way that is legitimate, high-quality, democratic, and (where necessary) global?

Update: The AI & Democracy Foundation was recently formed and funded to accelerate this work and we are hiring!

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This piece gives an overview of my AI & democracy work and provides links to my public writing and speaking. I’ll aim to keep it somewhat updated.

There is a core guiding challenge that motivates my work:

How can we govern the impacts of technology, at the necessary speed and scale, in a way that is legitimate, high-quality, democratic, and (where necessary) global?

Why does this matter? I believe that:

The impacts of AI are being defined by unilateral decisions—either centralized decisions by corporations and autocratic nations, or decentralized decisions to open ‘source’ AI systems.
Unilateral centralization creates dangerous concentration of power and strong pressures to compete for ‘AI supremacy’—leading competitors to cut corners on ethics and safety. Unilateral decentralization, while generally more well-intentioned, is leading to increasingly destructive weaponization of AI systems.

I believe we need viable alternatives to unilateralism and its negative impacts—and that we already have many of the basic ingredients.

Addressing this challenge first involved research exploring and observing a vast array of approaches to decision-making and governance to identify and synthesize mechanisms that:

1. Can be practical and legitimate at different scales—including globally where absolutely necessary.

2. Can provide high-quality informed decisions at sufficient speeds.

3. Can be connected to influence and power.

That research led to deep analysis of two particularly promising approaches—representative deliberations (such as citizens' assemblies) and collective response processes—both of which may be able to satisfy these criteria (with sufficient support infrastructure). These can be informed and supported through e.g., multistakeholder, mass participatory, case development, and simulation processes which also provide promising pieces of the puzzle (alongside some very creative novel processes).

The applied side of my work involves helping technology companies, civil society, governments, and international organizations understand the potential benefits and limitations of such governance processes, navigate the tradeoffs to identify the most appropriate mechanisms, and support their work in applying those methods.

Much of that work is not public, but involved engaging with companies and governments to find allies who could see how this could benefit them, the public, and our critical institutions, and advising on the execution and funding of such processes.

The following are highlights from my more public work.

Overview

📃 Reimagining Democracy for AI | Journal of Democracy (overview; direct paper link; non-paywalled preprint)
This paper provides an overview of much of this work, and why it matters. The following is the abstract:

AI advances are shattering assumptions that both our democracies and our international order rely on. Reinventing our “democratic infrastructure” is thus critically necessary—and 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.

Deliberation for AI Governance

🎤 Can ChatGPT Make This Podcast? | The New York Times [Dec 2022 • 🐦 thread]
Starting about 31 minutes in, I talk about how we can govern and align AI using democratic processes, including at global scale, building on the ideas of "platform democracy" through citizen assemblies and "generative CI". I back this up with concrete examples of transnational and global deliberations run by the EU and Meta (Facebook); and by the UN using AI to support such governance in wartorn Libya.

📰 Meta Ran a Giant Experiment in Governance. Now It’s Turning to AI | WIRED • [July 2023]
An op-ed I wrote about my interactions with and observations of Meta’s massive deliberative process and recommendations for their upcoming process on generative AI. I argue that we will need such governance innovation if we are to navigate the narrow pathway between autocratic centralization and ungovernable decentralization.

📧 Deliberative Polls, Citizen Assemblies, and an Online Deliberation Platform
A closer look into that deliberative process, including a deep dive into two different kinds of deliberative democratic process (the differences matter!) and the online system used for running the deliberation.

📃 “Democratising AI”: Multiple Meanings, Goals, and Methods | AIES
Section 5.2 describes more formally how global AI governance might work, and how 'representative deliberative processes' (like citizens' assemblies) overcome some of the critical challenges of multistakeholder and participatory processes.

📰 Can ‘we the people’ keep AI in check? | TechCrunch (🐦)
Overview of the idea of using citizens' assemblies for the governance of AI.

📰 Red Teaming GPT-4 Was Valuable. Violet Teaming Will Make It Better | WIRED (🐦 thread)
An op-ed I wrote about getting ahead of the impacts of AI—and reiterating the potential for deliberative processes for AI governance. (I also did a 📻 Marketplace Tech interview aired on NPR covering similar ground.)

📺 Generative AI Is About To Reset Everything, And, Yes It Will Change Your Life | Forbes - YouTube
Well-produced mini-documentary with close to a million views about generative AI—and where I introduce the potential for using deliberative processes for AI governance.

AI for deliberative governance

These papers are somewhat more technical but get into the details of what it looks like to augment deliberative governance with AI.

📃 'Generative CI' through Collective Response Systems | arXiv (🐦 thread)
Distills the key components of governance and sense-making tools like Polis, Remesh, PSi, etc. in a set of key properties and principles in order to help enable a richer understanding of the possibility space. In doing so it, Illustrates a potential correspondence between generative collective intelligence processes and generative AI processes.

📃 Elicitation Inference Optimization for Multi-Principal-Agent Alignment | NeurIPS FMDM
Shows how one can scale collective response processes using elicitation inference with the help of a large language model and a latent factor model (new, more precise, more readable, and updated version coming soon!).

Deliberation for social media governance (motivated by governing AI ranking systems)

One of the core motivations of this work was to provide an alternative approach for determining the objective function of recommender systems—so still definitely AI—though I focused more on policy questions as a foot in the door for company allies (as there is a more obvious set of needs for corporations there that new forms of delegated governance can help address).

📃 Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure | Belfer Center | Harvard (🐦 thread)
Articulates how democratic governance solves a direct pain point for tech companies and goes into detail on how one particular viable approach, the citizen assembly model, can be applied in the context of a technology platform.

🎤 ‎Techdirt: What Is Platform Democracy? on Apple Podcasts
Podcast with Mike Masnick that goes into more detail.

📰 To build trust, platforms should try a little democracy | Platformer
Well-articulated coverage of the platform democracy proposal by Casey Newton.

📧 ‘Platform Democracy’—a very different way to govern powerful tech (🐦 thread)
Alludes to some of the work I did bringing the platform assembly model to Twitter—which would have been piloted in the summer of 2022 had the acquisition bid not (unintentionally) killed it. Also introduces Meta's 32-country deliberation which I have been a formal 3rd party observer to, in addition to informally advising their pilots.

📃 Interoperable Platform Democracy
How deliberative democratic processes commissioned by corporations can interact with nation-state, multilateral, and multistakeholder decision-making

Enabling a functional information ecosystem

While one of the benefits of representative deliberations is that they can create their own internal robust and informed information ecosystem, the broader information ecosystem still matters significantly and that is where much of my prior (and some current) work has been focused. Many of the insights about the broader information ecosystem can help support representative deliberations and vice versa.

📃 Bridging-based ranking | Belfer Center | Harvard (🐦 thread)
This piece introduced the term bridging-based ranking—an alternative to engagement-based and chronological ranking, meant to overcome their incentives for division.

📃 Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance | ‘Optimizing for What?' (🐦 thread)
Articulates a research and practice area, around how to build systems that bridge divides, including recommender systems, governance systems, etc.; provides a menu of open problems for research and practice.

A positive future we can aim for

In the past few months, and especially the past month, this space has been particularly exciting as many more people and organizations have started taking concrete steps in similar directions as I describe above. There is an increasing appetite for exploring the intersections of AI for governance, and governance or alignment of AI using citizen assemblies and related deliberative processes and tools. I hope to share more of a map of the developing ecosystem in a future piece.

Finally, I want to highlight two recent pieces that are not from me: this open letter organized by AI Now (with signatories from across the AI ethics and safety “camps”) around the necessity of governance of general-purpose AI and an article by Rumman Chowdhury arguing for the need for global oversight¹ of AI. I believe that we can develop ‘wise systems’—including modern reimaginings of democracy—to help with both.

Thanks to Andrew Konya and Rahmin Sarabi for reading drafts of this.

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1. My current stance on global regulation is what I call minimally monist—ensure as much pluralism and sovereignty as possible and aim for subsidiarity—but also recognize that we are all together here on a single interconnected planet. There are some critical decisions that may irreversibly impact everyone—including potentially decisions involving AI development and use.