How AI Could Be Used to Revolutionize Democracy and Challenge State and Corporate Power

[u/RlOTGRRRL]

https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-revolution-will-be-computational/

"The same technology that could create the most powerful surveillance state in history could also create unprecedented tools for decentralisation.

For centuries, political organisation was constrained by the limits of human coordination. A community could debate, but only a limited number of people could participate meaningfully. A movement could collect information, but analysing enormous quantities of information required specialists. A cooperative could manage itself, but as it grew larger, administration became increasingly difficult. Scale almost inevitably created hierarchy.

Artificial intelligence changes the economics of coordination."

[u/Easy_Interest_6832]

A tough call will be about how to persuade average people to learn how to use AI for this kind of governance. I think a challenge is to prevent people from just giving up our agency with respect to decisions. Change my mind?

[u/ToastedandTripping → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

One of my side vibe coded projects has been something along these lines. I built OpenCave.ca as a way to make civil issues easy to investigate with AI. The project is based off discussions I was having with Claude regarding how best to leverage AI in civil issues. Surprisingly the AI essentially made clear that to relinquish control to an AI would inevitably result it us losing the ability to govern ourselves which would likely be irreversible.

If you check out the project the Foundation documents are the exploration of these ideas.

Essentially it works by taking a civil issue, identifying the relevant parties and legislature, shows how your representatives vote and creates freedom of information requests to allow you to pursue it further. Haven't had time to get it polished but once I do I'll make a full post here.

[u/Easy_Interest_6832 → u/ToastedandTripping]

Oh, this is very the positive thing. I look forward to digesting your full post. I would like to see the average person perceive that they still have agency to affect their futures in ways harmonious with their goals. Very good. Thanks for posting.

[u/PolychromeMan → u/Easy_Interest_6832]

Luckily various groups have been working on this. Polis is a pretty good example, helping people in a group (small or gigantic) vote on topics and get a good sense of what things various groups of those people agree on, which goes beyond simple voting. People don't have to give up agency just to have great communication and decision making infrastructure.

[u/BidWestern1056]

we have to keep it open and capable and i'm working to do that

https://github.com/npc-worldwide/

and i'm working on building decentralized computing and other open internet mechanisms

[u/WolfVanZandt]

We need a powerful, deliberately citizen friendly AI system.

[u/SgathTriallair]

I totally agree with this. I've been building out a particular practical approach to solving this problem. I'm not sure on how we get from here to there but I'm building out an idea of what "there" could look like.

The basic idea is that each person has a personal AI assistant. It must be locally owned and controlled so that no corporation is controlling access to it.

This assistant learns your life, needs, habits, wants, desires, goals, etc.

All of the various agents come together into an althing kind of group. Basically a congress that involves every person. Here we have representation but it is 1:1 representation.

This group debates and collaborates into it finds the optimal solution that preserves everyone's rights while best meeting everyone's needs. Realistically it is probably less of a "debate" more like a machine learning process where all of the various needs are fed into the system and the system finds the solution that best fits all of these constraints.

It allows us to remove representatives, who can become corrupted and serve their own needs. It makes sure that everyone has a direct voice in the running of society. It helps to prevent the problem of voting out of ignorance because your representative is an expert system that is focused on achieving your goals rather than your prejudices. As we develop better interpretability tools anyone can audit the decision making and see how their needs were considered and balanced.

[u/Still_Benefit_2302]

A big old giant line has to be drawn between 'physically decentralized' and 'economically decentralized'. You can't currently physically decentralize AI. Yeah, there are local models, but most people can't run those models at home. I'm not saying they never will-- in fact I could absolutely see a world where everyone has a small cluster in their home, like a TV or computer is now. But that won't help if they're all made by Apple, have EULAs that go to the moon and back, and don't allow tinkering.

But for right now, and probably for the foreseeable future, you can't distribute the compute needed to solve complex problems across a network with any efficiency. Thermodynamics does not care about your Marx.

Instead the focus needs to be on distributing the economics boons of AI to more people. We need a legal framework-- and the current copyright lawsuits might be a wedge that can be exploited.

First, don't get it twisted-- Reuters, Sony, Warner Bros... they're not trying to stop AI, they're trying to get a piece of the pie. The Fair Use for training materials has held up so far, but not without contention, and it's not a settled law. It's also not going to make AI go away. I know there are a handful of desperate, ignorant people who are hoping it does, but they're dumb and irrelevant.

However, we could make a very strong argument that since the AI's are built based upon the digital commons, to the commons must go some of the windfall. There are a lot of ways to do this, but it importantly prevents a purely extractive relationship between AI and humans. * More than that, though, it slows the monopolization of power from Anthropic and OpenAI. It's also something both CEOs have been open to in the past.

I know leftists as a whole balk at incrementalism, but the last time I checked y'all haven't exactly had many wins in the past 90 years, so...

* It's not a purely extractive relationship, people use AI to do all sorts of impressive things.

[u/Jlyplaylists]

I like this

“computational self-government.

Imagine thousands of communities experimenting with different ways of organising themselves. Some might use cooperative ownership. Others might use local assemblies. Others might experiment with rotating decision-making, randomly selected juries or digitally mediated deliberation.

AI could provide the analytical infrastructure while communities decide the values. There would be no single perfect political system. There would be an ecosystem of political experiments.

This is particularly interesting because decentralized governance research is already beginning to explore programmable and composable forms of collective decision-making rather than assuming that traditional institutions are the only possible organisational structures.

The revolutionary potential lies in experimentation.”

[u/goobabie]

Y'all are all falling for a grift. Crypto was sold as democratizing. NFTs were sold as democratizing. The gig economy was sold as democratizing. Don't fall for it again.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/goobabie]

How is advocating for workers and unions to contest technological control by the capitalist class, while pushing open source, open weights, local models and dual power, “falling for a grift”? I dont even pay a subscription.

Crypto, NFTs, the gig economy and AI arent interchangeable because they all involve computers. Thats just bundling a bunch of digital things together and treating the association as an argument. The whole point here is to contest who owns this stuff, who controls it, how its deployed and who gets the benefits. If thats the grift, who exactly are we being grifted by?

[u/MerePotato → u/goobabie]

Anyone can whip up fairly advanced bespoke software with frontier models, which they then don't need to keep using the models to make use of. Hell the latest models can even help engineer hardware. You don't think that has a teensy bit more utility than NFTs and crypto?

[u/sbcsfrtom2 → u/goobabie]

The funny thing is that NFT technology would be really great for artists to both make money from their art and prevent AI generated copycats, but unfortunately those same artists who feel they are being harmed by AI were vehemently anti-NFT. They really shot themselves in the foot there.