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.
Video
The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley
The Ash Center hosted an online book talk with author Marietje Schaake and discussant Bruce Schneier on Schaake’s latest work, The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. The discussion was moderated by Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation.
Issues
In The Tech Coup, Marietje Schaake explains how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can-and must-resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world. Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world—and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.
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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.