A Roadmap to Democratic AI
We are launching a Roadmap to Democratic AI, in which we put forward numerous paths towards greater collective stewardship and better-distributed benefits of AI.
When it comes to AI, we can still take the democratic path—but it is not the default one. Our social institutions—corporations, government, bureaucracy—are not currently equipped to take on this task. Democratic innovation is a public good: it is systematically under-provided without intervention. This is especially true for democratic innovation in governing AI. Practically, it’s hard to develop better decision-making and distribution mechanisms that match the speed, focus, and concentration of resources driving the world’s shiniest technology. It’s hard to improve collective intelligence at the rate we’re improving artificial intelligence. But that’s what we need to do.
We founded the Collective Intelligence Project to find a new default path, and to build a better future. This work requires experimentation, commitment, resources, partnership, and coalition-building. We’re grateful for the opportunity to work alongside, and learn from, inspiring colleagues who share our goal: to ensure that progress, participation, and safety don’t have to trade off. Why democratic AI? We think of democracy as more than deliberation, public input, or elections. At its core, democracy is a set of adaptive, accountable institutions that process and act on decentralized information, provide public goods, and safeguard people’s freedom, wellbeing, and autonomy. When we say democratic AI, we mean an AI ecosystem that does the same, by default. This document is our attempt to concretely describe what can be immediately done, built, researched, advocated for, and funded in 2024 in the AI ecosystem to achieve that goal.
It’s worth saying up front: We do not think this document is exhaustive. We don’t discuss AI’s impact on the nuts and bolts of existing, nation-state democracy. We don’t cover the necessary role of stronger labor movements or a robust and expanded social safety net, nor do we discuss many ways we think AI could be used for direct public benefit, from healthcare to public services to education. We are an R&D lab at heart; our focus here reflects this. Finally, this is a living document. We believe in collective intelligence; naturally, we also believe we’re probably missing something that you know. If you have an idea or a good example that we missed, if you vigorously disagree and are willing to walk us through your reasoning, or if you want to collaborate on the next steps below, please reach out to us at hi@cip.org.
We’re still early, but that doesn’t mean we have much time. If you share this vision, we want to work with you, build with you, and support you.
Let’s do this.
