Danielle Allen
Professor of Public Policy, James Bryant Conant University Professor
Allen Lab: Technology & Democracy
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation’s Technology and Democracy workstream aims to ensure that emerging technologies are developed and governed in support of the public benefit.
The Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation’s Technology and Democracy workstream is focused on developing democracy-supportive technology policies, harnessing the opportunities for emerging technologies to improve governance, fostering professional norms that lead to technology development supportive of human pluralism, and building a robust pipeline of experts who can bridge ethical and technical considerations within policy and industry spaces. We pursue this work through foundational analysis and theory, field-building, and policy development.
Research Areas
Some of our research areas include:
Public AI
Section 230 Reform
GETTING-Plurality Research Network
At the center of our work is our multidisciplinary research network. The Governance of Emerging Technology and Tech Innovations for Next-Gen Governance (GETTING-Plurality) is a research network linking philosophers, social scientists, computer scientists, legal scholars, and technologists. This unique collaborative unites tech ethics initiatives at Harvard University with external impact partners across higher education and the tech industry, bringing philosophers and ethicists to the table for every project.
Our network seeks to advance understanding of how to shape, guide, govern, and deploy technological development in support of democracy, collective intelligence, and other public goods. Our focus is on how to do so, given the plural nature of human intelligence. We connect theory with practice to ensure that academic insights inform real-world policy and industry standards.
Leadership
Darshan Goux
PhD, Senior Lab Director
Sarah Hubbard
Associate Director for Technology & Democracy
Allison Stanger
Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation;
Co-Director and Co-Investigator, GETTING-Plurality Research Network
Feb. 2024-Jan. 2026
Network Members
Antón Barba-Kay
Distinguished Fellow, Center on Privacy and Technology, Georgetown Law
Emily Clough
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Northeastern University
Tina Eliassi-Rad
Professor, Northeastern University
Ami Fields-Meyer
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
July 2024-June 2026
Jonas Kgomo
Founder, Equiano Institute
Yu-Ting Kuo
Faculty Member, MIT and National Tsing Hua University
Seth Lazar
Professor of Philosophy, Australian National University
Anna Lewis
Research Scientist, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Cris Moore
Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Puja Ohlhaver
Researcher & Lawyer
Omoaholo Omoakhalen
Founder, Remake Africa & Plurality Lead, School of Politics, Policy and Governance
Aviv Ovadya
Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center & Affiliate, Centre for the Governance of AI
Nick Pyati
Strategy, Microsoft
Manon Revel
Postdoctoral Researcher, Meta FAIR & Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center
Mathias Risse
Faculty Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy & Professor, Harvard Kennedy School
Bruce Schneier
Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy
Ajeet Singh
Physician Instructor and Clinical Informaticist, Rush University Medical Center
Tessel van Oirsouw
EthicAI and Former Visiting Fellow, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation
Glen Weyl
Research Lead, Microsoft Research, Plural Technology Collaboratory & Founder, RadicalxChange Foundation
Zachary Wojtowicz
Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology and Economic Theory, Harvard University
Kinney Zalesne
Former Co-Head of Corporate Strategy, Microsoft
Graduate Student Network Members
Nate Hiatt
PhD Candidate in Political Science, Yale University
Charlotte Siegmann
PhD Candidate in Economics, MIT
Luke Thorburn
PhD Candidate, King's College London
Alumni
Zoë Hitzig
Research Scientist, OpenAI
Saffron Huang
Co-Founder, Collective Intelligence Project
Uma Ilavarasan
PhD Candidate in Government, Harvard University
Shrey Jain
Researcher, Microsoft Research
Woojin Lim
Researcher, Harvard College
Divya Siddarth
Co-Founder, Collective Intelligence Project
The latest news, resources, and research
Commentary
We Don’t Need to Reinvent our Democracy to Save it from AI
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
Q+A
‘Generative CI’ through Collective Response Systems
How can many people (who may disagree) come together to answer a question or make a decision?
Digital Humanism: The Time Is Now
Digital humanism highlights the complex relationships between people, society, nature, and machines. It has been embraced by a growing community of individuals and groups who are setting directions that may change current paradigms. Here we focus on the initiatives generated by the Vienna Manifesto.
Commentary
How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy
“… for all the consternation over the potential for humans to be replaced by machines in formats like poetry and sitcom scripts, a far greater threat looms: artificial intelligence replacing humans in the democratic processes — not through voting, but through lobbying.”
Cryptocurrencies and National Security: The Case of Money Laundering and Terrorism Financing
This Article reviews the anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) framework and its application to cryptocurrencies. Then, it presents case studies demonstrating the important contributions that the AML/CFT toolkit has made to countries’ security.
Hybrid Intelligence: A Paradigm for More Responsible Practice
The authors propose an alternate approach to mainstream AI practice that broadens the focus beyond algorithms viewed in isolation to processes of human-algorithm collaboration.
Commentary
To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up
There isn’t much we can agree on these days. But two sweeping statements that might garner broad support are “We need to fix technology” and “We need to fix democracy.”
Podcast
Consumers vs. Citizens in Democracy’s Public Sphere
Attempting to balance the challenging trade-offs between individual rights and our obligations to one another.
Big Tech’s Rise to Political Power
An interview with Allison Stanger
Policy Brief
Bridging-Based Ranking
This report explores the potential of bridging and discusses some of the most common objections, addressing questions around legitimacy and practicality.
Commentary
The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question
Fixating on the degree—rather than the type—of decentralization is leading us astray.
Decentralized Society: Finding Web3’s Soul
Web3 today centers around expressing transferable, financialized assets, rather than encoding social relationships of trust.
Policy Brief
How AI Fails Us
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.
Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure
Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the speech of billions. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power.
Aviv Ovadya proposes an alternative: platform democracy.
The Real Cost of Surveillance Capitalism: Digital Humanism in the US and Europe
Alison Stanger argues that the real threat to liberal democracies is not capitalism, but the growing inequalities that corporate surveillance in its unfettered form both reveals and exacerbates.