S6.1 - ‘The People are the Superintelligence’: How AI affects political deliberation and democracy

I know that you believe digital technology can empower people, bridge divides, and renew democracy.

Those are powerful claims.

They're very big claims.

And I imagine that our listeners will be very interested in them, probably intrigued by them.

At the same time, I think at least some listeners will be a bit skeptical.

So, Audrey, tell us why you believe technology can renew democracy and empower people.

Over to you, Audrey.

Well, when people imagine technology meeting politics, usually we picture the worst of it.

Immediately, people think about the echo chamber, the outrage that keeps us doom-scrolling, the platform that profits when we are at our angriest.

And of course, they would be right that this exists in the world.

But I have come to believe that this high PPM, polarization per minute, toxic environment, is a choice in design.

It is not an unavoidable feature of the digital age.

So we can build the opposite.

And one very particular personal place where I learned that In 2015, the ride-hailing company Uber arrived in Taiwan, and the country split.

Drivers furious, passengers divided, the government under tremendous pressure to simply ban ride-sharing.

But instead of staging a debate where people shouted at each other, we opened a conversation on an open-source tool called Polis.

And police has an unusual rule.

There was no reply button.

And you cannot quote someone in order to thump to attack them.

You could only write your own short statement or agree and disagree with what others wrote.

About 900 people cast some 30,000 votes, with nearly 2,000 more joining the live sessions.

And the system is not about picking a winner.

We drew a map together, and we found the sentences that the people in completely different camps, drivers, passengers, engineers, all agree on.

We call them the uncommon ground, the rarely discovered common ground.

And starting with passenger safety, and surge pricing without undercutting meters, and civil servants copied those points of agreement straight into regulation.