Additional Resource  

Democracy as Approximation: A Primer for “AI for Democracy” Innovators

This essay was adopted from a presentation given by Aviv Ovadya at the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy held on the campus of Harvard Kennedy School in December 2023.

This essay was adapted from a presentation given by Aviv Ovadya at the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy held on the campus of Harvard Kennedy School in December 2023. Convened with support from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the conference was intended to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century.

Can we accelerate democratic innovation by recalling that real-world democracy is an imperfect approximation of an ideal? How might AI help?

“No matter what form of democracy we are aiming for, we should remember that all democracy is, by necessity, an imperfect approximation of an ideal worth striving for. The only question is what kind of democracy we choose to cultivate with the resources that we can bring to bear, ” writes Ovadya.

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A Roadmap for Governing AI: Technology Governance and Power-Sharing Liberalism

Open Access Resource

A Roadmap for Governing AI: Technology Governance and Power-Sharing Liberalism

This paper aims to provide a roadmap for governing AI. In contrast to the reigning paradigms, we argue that AI governance should be not merely a reactive, punitive, status-quo-defending enterprise, but rather the expression of an expansive, proactive vision for technology—to advance human flourishing.

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