Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. My guest today is Nathan Sanders. He's a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. And he's also published a new book with Bruce Schneier titled, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship", and he's here with me today to talk about that book. Mr. Sanders, welcome to the program.

Nathan Sanders: So glad to join you, thank you.

GR: We appreciate you making the time. So, we'll get into the specific topics that are covered in your book, but first I wanted to ask you just a couple of basic, big picture items to set the context here, and the first one is the most basic of all. All of us have heard by now of artificial intelligence. Most of us have probably intentionally used AI to answer some question or another, but to just start us off, could you give us a very, very concise definition of what artificial intelligence is and what distinguishes it from high powered computing more generally?

NS: Oh, it’s such a great and foundational question, and I acknowledge that almost everybody, especially those who are experts in the fields, defines AI little bit differently. In our book, we try not to get bogged down in the technical distinctions and all the variations of how AI models are built, and instead we adopt a very broad definition. That, for our purposes, AI is any technology that replaces a cognitive function that used to be the exclusive domain of humans. So that does include technologies like large language models, which are used to do things like generate text that you might use in writing an email, or also to control external systems like software systems that maybe used to have required a human in control, but it does include other forms of AI as well. Think of, for example, Google Maps or navigation software that's helping you plan a route from point A to point B, something that is a very hard, challenging computing and used to be something only humans can do you, you think of that AI as well, as well as computer vision models, other forms of natural language processing and predictive machine learning as well.

GR: All right. Well, I'm glad I asked, and it is already complicated. Now, your book is about the application of AI in the politics and the public policy arena. Let me just start with kind of the end if I can, and that is, could you give me, say, your two biggest hopes for how AI could improve what we do in the politics and public policy arena and on the other hand, your two biggest concerns or worries about it?

NS: Sure. In terms of hopes, one thing I am optimistic about is the ability of citizens, of people to leverage any new technology and including AI, to enhance our power as citizens of democracies. We have some great case studies and examples of what that looks like around the world in our book. We talk about citizens groups using AI to watchdog the government to incorporate instances of public corruption. We write about a great example of a group in Brazil that's been using AI for that purpose for about a decade, long preceding the current modern developments and large language model technologies. We talk about groups of citizens in the US and elsewhere around the world who are using AI to improve how citizens can have their voices heard in policymaking processes, helping people to articulate their views about the laws that should govern all of us and communicate that in an impactful way to the legislature. So there's obviously a huge risk, and we see this as the central risk that AI poses to democracy, of the technology being used to concentrate power and make the already powerful more powerful. But I am optimistic about citizens groups leveraging the technology to switch those dynamics. In terms of fears, I already mentioned the biggest one, that it will be used to concentrate power. And of course, we do see examples of that around the world. We see AI as a fundamentally power magnifying technology, and that means that pro-democracy advocates that want to reform good governance using the technology, they can use it for that purpose and it can be effective. But just as well, elected officials and others with authoritarian tendencies that want to use AI to control citizens and to enforce unjust policies, AI will magnify their power as well, and we can see examples of that around the world today also.

GR: We'll get into some of those a little bit later. I wanted to ask you a more of a historical question as a follow on to that. And I was thinking about this and I was wondering how would AI compare with technological innovations of the past that have also had great impacts on politics? I thought of three right away. One very simple one is simply the ability to amplify a voice, you know, voice amplification. And then of course, you have radio, then you have opinion surveying and polling. And then an obvious one would be television. Those are all the ones that came to mind to me. Do you think that AI is going to have a more dramatic effect than those kinds of technological innovations, or will it be comparable or less? I don’t know.

NS: Well, I think you're right to locate AI along a historical spectrum of new technologies that, when they're introduced, affect not just politics, not just government and administration, but really everything. I'm not a historian, but I know historians and economists have a classification of what are called general purpose technologies, technologies that really do change and transform everything. Maybe some people differ about what belongs in that category, but it includes things like telecommunications and includes things like railroads and includes things like universities as knowledge generation technologies. And I do think we can locate AI along that spectrum. In terms of political applications, you know, we see AI transforming the way that people interact with candidates and elected officials in a way that extends the progression of the introduction of whistlestop tours on the back of railroad cars, moving into broadcast communications like radio, moving into visual communications with television, moving into the internet and social media, and now it's getting the ability to not just broadcast opinions, but to individually respond to questions, tailor conversations to an individual person, and even exchange information in a two way communication with many, many individuals at mass scale in a way that previous technologies just wouldn't have made possible. And once again, that capability can be applied to good purposes that most of us and most of your listeners would probably think are beneficial. And it can definitely be applied in negative ways as well.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the data scientist Nathan Sanders. And we're discussing his new book. It's titled, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship". So, let's get into some of these things more specifically and you have given us clues about the arguments that you, the two of you make in your book. But how would AI affect democracy specifically? You talked about the concerns about concentrating power in the way that citizens might do things, but how will it affect democracy as a system of government? And I'm going to define democracy here very broadly in the way that you defined AI as being a system in which the people, usually through elected representatives and their leaders, give laws to themselves. And I think that's sort of the fundamental essence of it. How do you think AI is going to affect us?

NS: It's a great question and of course, it's a broad one. In our book, we do go through in-depth applications across all the major branches and systems of governance, politics, citizenship, the judiciary, the administrative branch.

GR: And I want to get into some of those, each with you, as we go on. But go ahead.

NS: And maybe what I can do to start that conversation is just to share an example that we think is really interesting, that we've just written an update to the story we shared in the book of the most recent happenings that, specifically talks about how citizens and candidates, voters and candidates engage with each other. We just wrote a story about what's happening in Japan right now with a brand new political party called Team Mirai that is really reimagining how politics works and using AI as a tool in that reimagination. This is a party that was founded by a 30-something software engineer named Takahiro Anno. And at the time we wrote the book, he had just run for office for the first time. He had run for governor of Tokyo, and he is, as an individual software developer, had made some tools to help him get the word out about his platform and views, and to get feedback from people that were novel and helped him reach hundreds of thousands of people in the Tokyo electorate in a way that a individual candidate traditionally couldn't do. Now, since we published the book, he's now been elected to the upper chamber of the Japanese national legislature, the Diet. So, he's effectively a senator now in Japan, and he has founded a political party, and he's now receiving public funding that is distributed to Japanese parties, and he's using it to advance that vision. He's hiring engineers and using it to build new politica...

Nathan Sanders on the Campbell Conversations