He was surrounded by seven staff from the world's leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill's view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

This paper introduces a local search method for improving an existing program with respect to a measurable objective. Program Optimization with Locally Improving Search (POLIS) exploits the structure of a program, defined by its lines. POLIS improves a single line of the program while keeping the remaining lines fixed, using existing brute-force synthesis algorithms, and continues iterating until it is unable to improve the program's performance. POLIS was evaluated with a 27-person user study, where participants wrote programs attempting to maximize the score of two single-agent games: Lunar Lander and Highway. POLIS was able to substantially improve the participants' programs with respect to the game scores. A proof-of-concept demonstration on existing Stack Overflow code measures applicability in real-world problems. These results suggest that POLIS could be used as a helpful programming assistant for programming problems with measurable objectives.

Polis is a platform that leverages machine intelligence to scale up deliberative processes. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and risks associated with applying Large Language Models (LLMs) towards challenges with facilitating, moderating and summarizing the results of Polis engagements. In particular, we demonstrate with pilot experiments using Anthropic's Claude that LLMs can indeed augment human intelligence to help more efficiently run Polis conversations. In particular, we find that summarization capabilities enable categorically new methods with immense promise to empower the public in collective meaning-making exercises. And notably, LLM context limitations have a significant impact on insight and quality of these results. However, these opportunities come with risks. We discuss some of these risks, as well as principles and techniques for characterizing and mitigating them, and the implications for other deliberative or political systems that may employ LLMs. Finally, we conclude with several open future research directions for augmenting tools like Polis with LLMs.

AI systems may be better thought of as peers than as tools. This paper explores applications of augmented collective intelligence (ACI) beneficial to collaborative ideation. Design considerations are offered for an experiment that evaluates the performance of hybrid human- AI collectives. The investigation described combines humans and large language models (LLMs) to ideate on increasingly complex topics. A promising real-time collection tool called Polis is examined to facilitate ACI, including case studies from citizen engagement projects in Taiwan and Bowling Green, Kentucky. The authors discuss three challenges to consider when designing an ACI experiment: topic selection, participant selection, and evaluation of results. The paper concludes that researchers should address these challenges to conduct empirical studies of ACI in collaborative ideation.

DENVER – In this post-impeachment era of divisiveness and deadlock in the nation's capital, Uncle Sam has a message for top U.S. technologists: A Washington-based nerd strike force called the U.S. Digital Service is seeking private-sector coders, programmers and software engineers to make government user-friendly for a tech-savvy U.S. public. Launched after the 2013 crash of the Obama administration's Healthcare.gov website, the USDS recruits the nation's top tech talent for Peace Corps-style tours of duty to tackle the government's most pressing information management and online security problems. It has an increasingly rare distinction as an initiative supported by both the Obama and Trump administrations, according to current and former USDS staff and White House officials. "We've been enthusiastic about USDS since Day One," said Mathew Lira, a special assistant to Trump in the White House Office of American Innovation. Early USDS projects -- fixing the public-facing website of Obama's Affordable Care Act, helping green card holders apply for renewals electronically -- might not be top Trump administration priorities today. But many projects continue: Enabling electronic access to health records for millions of Medicare patients and their doctors; building a robust and navigable Veterans Administration website; securing civilian agency and Defense Department websites.

A new report published this week (18 November 2019) looking at the intersection of AI and journalism has issued a warning to global newsrooms: collaborate with your competitors or face extinction. A global survey of journalism and artificial intelligence' is a joint project between Polis, the international journalism think-tank at London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Google News Initiative, who has funded the research. It surveyed 71 international news organisations on their on use of artificial intelligence for editorial purposes across a seven-month period, showing that just 37 per cent of them have a dedicated AI strategy. Charlie Beckett, director, Polis, London School of Economics and Political Science, said that newsrooms have between two and five years to develop a meaningful strategy, or risk fading out of the digital landscape. "This is a marathon, not a sprint - but they've got to start running now," he said.

Take it from Gov. Jared Polis, a veteran of the tech startup scene introduced as Colorado's "innovator in chief" Wednesday at a Denver Startup Week panel on the evolution of technology and its impact on everyday life. "I was just at Amazon's new facility in Thornton," Polis said. "Inside, where we used to see human-operated forklifts they have little intelligent robots that are carrying the crates around." The question now, Polis said, is how will public policy take shape around that AI technology so that it supports innovation but keeps human beings relevant in the economy going forward? Polis sat opposite Nolan Bushnell during the session.