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.
Commentary
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
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.
Additional Resource
In a new essay, The Case for Building an AmeriCorps Alumni Leadership Network, Allen Lab Policy Fellow Sonali Nijhawan argues that the 1.4 million Americans who have completed national service represent an underleveraged civic asset. Drawing on her experience as former Director of AmeriCorps, Nijhawan outlines a roadmap for transforming dispersed alumni into a connected leadership network capable of reinvigorating public service, rebuilding trust in government, and strengthening civic participation.
Additional Resource
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
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.
Open Access Resource
Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation Senior Fellow Allison Stanger, in collaboration with Jaron Lanier and Audrey Tang, envision a post-Section 230 landscape that fosters innovation in digital public spaces using models optimized for public interest rather than attention metrics.