Commentary
India & the Olympics of AI
Allen Lab Fellow Jeremy McKey reflects on India’s AI Impact Summit, exploring the theme of diffusion and the implications for sovereignty and democracy.
Feature
Technology and Democracy: What to Read This Summer
This list of resources, curated by the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, highlights emerging ideas at the intersection of technology and democracy.
Technology and democracy are at a crucial inflection point. The outcomes of the historic 2024 election year have revealed both the vulnerabilities and resilience of democratic institutions around the world. At the same time, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are reshaping our lives, with social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical implications.
For those interested in learning more, the reading list below, curated by the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, aims to reflect the urgency of the current moment. These books, articles, and videos explore the intersections of technology and democracy across disciplines, including philosophy, political theory, law, ethics, and policy. Together, they highlight the breadth of thought and impact related to technology’s role in our democratic lives, raising warnings and pointing to possibilities for the future.
Books
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI
Karen Hao 
Hao details AI companies’ quest toward artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical AI that has human-level intelligence, and outlines how they are quickly creating the “modern-day colonial world order.”
The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley
Marietje Schaake 
Schaake explains how technology companies’ unchecked power is undermining our democracies and shares potential solutions. To learn more, you can view this recording from the Ash Center’s online book talk with the author.
Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation
Greg M. Epstein 
Epstein questions our worship of technology and innovation, urging us to maintain a critical perspective before extending our faith.
The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life
Lowry Pressly 
Pressly explores the real value of privacy in our lives and why protecting it is critical for our humanity.
Algorithms for the People: Democracy in the Age of AI
Josh Simons 
Simons argues that the design, use, and regulation of AI are human choices that carry significant weight in maintaining a healthy democracy.
Articles and Essays
Political Economy of AI Essay Collection
Multiple authors
In this collection of essays, leading scholars and experts raise critical questions surrounding power, governance, and democracy as they consider how technology can better serve the public interest.
The National Security Case for Public AI
Ganesh Sitaraman and Alex Pascal
This report argues that public options for AI, along with utility-style regulation, will strengthen national security by promoting innovation and competition, preventing abuses of power and conflicts of interest, and advancing the public interest and national security goals.
Oligarchy, State, and Cryptopia
Julie E. Cohen
Cohen lays out how tech oligarchs, who wield unprecedented power, are reconfiguring our institutions, hollowing out public capacity, and challenging core democratic norms.
Prosocial Media
E. Glen Weyl, Luke Thorburn, Emillie de Keulenaar, Jacob Mchangama, Divya Siddarth, and Audrey Tang
In this paper, the authors present an alternative model for how social media could be redesigned to foster connection over division.
Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence
Roman Curia, Vatican
This important document from the Vatican lays out an ethical framework for AI, highlights the importance of human dignity and moral responsibility, and outlines a vision for the responsible development and use of this technology.
Deliberative Approaches to Inclusive Governance: An Essay Series Part of the Democratic Legitimacy for AI Initiative
Multiple authors
This essay series explores how deliberative processes can strengthen democracy, drawing on lessons from citizens’ assemblies and civic technology-enabled tools that are being tested around the world.
The Digitalist Papers
Multiple authors
This series features multiple authors exploring how AI has changed the world and envisioning the possible futures that the technology might present.
Videos
Danielle Allen at the Paris AI Action Summit
At the Paris AI Action Summit, Allen argued that DOGE represents the real-time implementation of an extreme ideological vision that defines the role that technology and a small cohort of its wealthiest leaders should play in the world.
Building a Digital Democracy
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and Institute of Politics hosted the “Building a Digital Democracy” panel in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School which brought together Audrey Tang, Megan Smith, Danielle Allen, and Mathias Risse for a conversation on how technology is being used to transform our political institutions.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.
More from this Program
Commentary
Allen Lab Fellow Spotlight: Why a People-Centered Approach to American Democracy Matters Now
Allen Lab Policy Fellow Christine Slaughter makes the case that democracy must be understood through people’s lived experiences and agency, not just institutions.
Commentary
Transparency is Insufficient: Lessons From Civic Technology for Anticorruption
Allen Lab Researcher David Riveros Garcia draws on his experience building civic technology to fight corruption in Paraguay to make the case that effective civic technology must include power and collective action in its design.
Commentary
India & the Olympics of AI
Allen Lab Fellow Jeremy McKey reflects on India’s AI Impact Summit, exploring the theme of diffusion and the implications for sovereignty and democracy.
Additional Resource
The Ecosystem of Deliberative Technologies for Public Input
Ensuring public opinion and policy preferences are reflected in policy outcomes is essential to a functional democracy. A growing ecosystem of deliberative technologies aims to improve the input-to-action loop between people and their governments.
Occasional Paper
Ethical-Moral Intelligence of AI
In a new working paper, Crocodile Tears: Can the Ethical-Moral Intelligence of AI Models Be Trusted?, Allen Lab authors Sarah Hubbard, David Kidd, and Andrei Stupu introduce an ethical-moral intelligence framework for evaluating AI models across dimensions of moral expertise, sensitivity, coherence, and transparency.