Additional Resource
How A.I. Can Be Good For Democracy
In a recent guest essay for The New York Times, Allen Lab Democracy Stack Fellow Beth Noveck argues for putting A.I. behind every public servant.
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.
Issues
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.
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Media Release
Allen Lab launches new Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative to help governments strengthen democracy through technology
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Open Book: Open-Source Budget Transparency for Municipalities
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Additional Resource
How A.I. Can Be Good For Democracy
In a recent guest essay for The New York Times, Allen Lab Democracy Stack Fellow Beth Noveck argues for putting A.I. behind every public servant.
Media Release
Allen Lab launches new Digital Civic Infrastructure Initiative to help governments strengthen democracy through technology
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Additional Resource
Massachusetts Municipal Leader Guide: Open Meeting Law in the Digital Age
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