Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Demos

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has an increasing say in the range of opportunities we are offered in life. Artificial neural networks might be used in deciding whether you will get a loan, an apartment, or your next job based on datasets collected from around the globe. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are used to produce real-looking but fake content online that can affect our political opinion-formation and election freedom. In some cases, our only contact for a service provider is an AI system, which is used to collect and analyze the content of customer input and to provide solutions with natural language processing. In the context of Western democracies, threats and issues related to these tools are frequently viewed as problematic. On the one hand, AI technologies are shown to help include more people in collective decision-making and potentially decrease the cognitive bias occurring when humans make decisions, leading to fairer outcomes.On the other hand, studies indicate that certain AI technologies can lead to biased decisions and decrease the level of human autonomy in a way that threatens our fundamental human rights. While recognizing individual cases where rights and freedoms are being violated, we can easily neglect rapid and in some cases alarming changes occurring in the big picture: People seem to have ever less control over their own lives and decisions that affect them. This has been brought forward by several authors and academics, such as James Muldoon in Platform Socialism, Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism and Mark Coeckelbergh in The Political Philosophy of AI. Control over one's life and collective decision-making are both essential building blocks of the fundamental structure of most Western societies: democracy. Whereas some attempts have already been made to better understand the relationship between AI and democracy (see, e.g., Nemitz 2018, Manheim & Kaplan 2019, and Mark Coeckelberg's above-mentioned book), the discussion remains limited.