Policy Brief
Researchers and funders should redirect focus from centralized autonomous general intelligence to a plurality of established and emerging approaches that extend cooperative and augmentative traditions as seen in successes such as Taiwan’s digital democracy project to collective intelligence platforms like Wikipedia.
The dominant vision of artificial intelligence imagines a future of large-scale autonomous systems outperforming humans in an increasing range of fields. This “actually existing AI” vision misconstrues intelligence as autonomous rather than social and relational. It is both unproductive and dangerous, optimizing for artificial metrics of human replication rather than for systemic augmentation, and tending to concentrate power, resources, and decision-making in an engineering elite. Alternative visions based on participating in and augmenting human creativity and cooperation have a long history and underlie many celebrated digital technologies such as personal computers and the internet. Researchers and funders should redirect focus from centralized autonomous general intelligence to a plurality of established and emerging approaches that extend cooperative and augmentative traditions as seen in successes such as Taiwan’s digital democracy project to collective intelligence platforms like Wikipedia. We conclude with a concrete set of recommendations and a survey of alternative traditions.
Media Release
Open Access Resource
With a majority of municipalities publishing their budgets as PDFs, Open Book offers a free alternative that towns own and run themselves.
Open Access Resource
This free, self-paced course equips public officials with the skills to design, run and learn from meaningful engagement with communities.
Media Release
Additional Resource
As public officials increasingly turn to digital tools, this guide helps Massachusetts municipal leaders navigate Open Meeting Law and their everyday digital practice while safeguarding transparency.
Policy Brief
As technology reshapes how public officials communicate with their communities, this policy brief offers recommendations for modernizing Massachusetts Open Meeting Law to protect transparency and accountability while enabling the tools that expand access to government.