Feature
The Past, Present, and Future of Democracy—A Summer Reading List from the Allen Lab
As we celebrate America’s 250th, the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation is reflecting on how we arrived at this moment and where we are headed.
Occasional Paper
A Roadmap for Governing AI: Technology Governance and Power Sharing Liberalism
This paper aims to provide a roadmap to AI governance. In contrast to the reigning paradigms, we argue that AI governance should not be merely a reactive, punitive, status-quo-defending enterprise, but rather the expression of an expansive, proactive vision for technology—to advance human flourishing. Advancing human flourishing in turn requires democratic/political stability and economic empowerment. Our overarching point is that answering questions of how we should govern this emerging technology is a chance not merely to categorize and manage narrow risk but also to construe the risks and opportunities much more broadly, and to make correspondingly large investments in public goods, personnel, and democracy itself. To lay out this vision, we take four steps. First, we define some central concepts in the field, disambiguating between forms of technological harms and risks. Second, we review normative frameworks governing emerging technology that are currently in use around the globe. Third, we outline an alternative normative framework based in power-sharing liberalism. Fourth, we walk through a series of governance tasks that ought to be accomplished by any policy framework guided by our model of power-sharing liberalism. We follow these with proposals for implementation vehicles.
Related Resources
Commentary
Allen Lab Fellow Spotlight: City Charters are Deliberative Democracy’s Friends
Allen Lab Fellow Tyler Fisher examines the untapped potential of city charters as a vehicle for deliberative democracy, arguing that advocates should work to embed tools like citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting, and town meetings directly into the governing architecture of cities, institutionalizing deliberative democracy one municipality at a time.
Q+A
Danielle Allen’s “Radical Duke” reveals an unsung catalyst of history
Allen uncovers the deep—then volatile—friendship between a British duke and Thomas Paine.
Commentary
Work in the Age of AI: Reflections from After Neoliberalism
Allen Lab member Charlie Covit reflects on the After Neoliberalism conference and examines the intersection of artificial intelligence and the future of work, arguing that AI forces a democratic reckoning with the meaning of labor itself and that an economy which generates abundance while stripping citizens of purpose and dignity undermines the very foundation of democratic life.
Media Release
AI models appear to recognize moral complexity — then ignore it, new study by researchers affiliated with Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab finds
New study published in AI and Ethics introduces a new ethical-moral intelligence framework for AI and finds that leading AI models mimic human moral concern while making decisions that reveal a hidden value hierarchy.
Article
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: Campaigns, Elections, Movements, and Deliberation
A new chapter in APSA Preprints by Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and Director of the Ash Center, Bailey Flanigan, former postdoctoral fellow at the Ash Center and co-authors explores how generative AI is reshaping four dimensions of democratic practice—political campaigns, election administration, social movements, and citizen deliberation. The authors argue that AI’s ultimate democratic impact will depend less on the technology itself, and more on how institutions and leaders implement and regulate it.