This week join Kobi and Natalie as they discuss some perhaps seemingly-unrelated global trends, and ponder how AI may or may not impact or amplify them in the future.

We raise questions about:

There are around 40 upcoming elections happening around the world in 2024; have we already seen advancements in AI play a role in driving a shift to the right, and what might we expect to see in the next year?
There is a trend where local media is becoming increasingly scarce - what does that mean for our local collective understandings & conversations, and global polarisation?
The lack of diversity (gender and otherwise) in technology media (and the technology industry in general) presents a major hurdle for language models of the future as it leads to a lack of variety in the type of voices on record today, and hence in training data tomorrow.

Links:

Where are all the godmothers of AI? In the Guardian

A 'Trump moment' in the Netherlands shows that Europe still has a populist problem - CNN

Brace for elections: 40 countries are voting in 2024 - Bloomberg

The Guardian view on local journalism's decline: bad news for democracy