Democracy and AI

A. C. Grayling

Abstract: The question of what positive and negative effects AI might have on democracy requires understanding the situation in which democratic polities find themselves today. It is significant that the advent of AI in forms that can be powerfully applied in ways that affect democratic practices and institutions, whether to enhance or endanger them, occurs just as these practices and institutions have begun to appear more fragile, even (in some eyes) less desirable, than they have been since the persuasiveness of democracy, both as concept and practice, emerged from the Enlightenment.

     There are numerous considerations in play in thinking about the interaction of AI and democracy, most of them familiar: on the one hand negatives such as misinformation, deep fakes, electoral interference, on the other hand positives such as participation, fact-checking, accountability and transparency, but I will focus on two considerations that lie at the base of much of these. One is the role of education in dealing with the ‘epistemic crisis’ threatened to a key desideratum in democratic process, viz. reliability of information. The other is the question of whether democracy itself can exert influence over AI development and use.     These are two different challenges in that whereas the first (education and the epistemic crisis) offers a route to countering negative effects of AI on democracy, the second – given that the speed of AI developments is fuelled by private enterprise competition and the government support it gets because of both GDP and military effects of supremacy in the AI race – offers grounds for great pessimism and worry. How democratic control can be exerted over technologies already capable of escaping and overthrowing democratic control is a major challenge for our time.      Some of the relevant background to this discussion is to be found in AC Grayling For the People (Oneworld 2025) and in his previous books about democracy and constitutionality Democracy and its Crisis (2017) and The Good State (2020). 

Join Zoom meeting:

https://monash.zoom.us/j/86351045263?pwd=1gHMLhmDnXiFJIV0Jl8s6GxhgBgylb.1 

Meeting ID: 863 5104 5263 // Passcode: 184791