Protected Democracy
The author explores the vulnerabilities in our democratic system that AI will affect. He advocates for “protected democratic deliberation,” akin to citizen assemblies, as a strategy to safeguard democracy in an AI-empowered world.
AI will affect democracy. We should begin by understanding the democracy it will affect. The United States was to be a “republic,” by which our framers meant a representative democracy. Yet the democracy that we now inhabit is not representative. It is certainly not majoritarian. Instead, our democracy has become, as Francis Fukuyama has described, a “vetocracy”—a system in which a large number of political actors with effective “veto” power make collective action enormously difficult. (1)
No doubt, as Fukuyama notes, our framers injected veto points throughout the Constitution’s design, and considered that design a virtue. But there can be too much of a good thing. And on top of their design, we have now layered norms and institutions that multiply those veto points, rendering the nation increasingly ungovernable. It is trivially easy for those with political resources to block significant action by our government, or to exchange a veto for extraordinary favors from government; it is familiar that the actual policy steps our government takes have little relation to the will of the ordinary voter. Many aspects of our democracy’s design yield this vetocracy, both original and evolved. Two are particularly salient when we consider the likely effects of AI: (1) the corrupting dependence of representatives on private wealth; and (2) the increasing polarization of both parties and voters.
“Many aspects of our democracy’s design yield this vetocracy, both original and evolved. Two are particularly salient when we consider the likely effects of AI: (1) the corrupting dependence of representatives on private wealth; and (2) the increasing polarization of both parties and voters.”
