The Digitalist Papers (on AI and Democracy in America) Now Out from Stanford

Check out the essays here, or buy a Kindle ($1.99) or paperback or hardcover copy on Amazon. The book was put together by Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Nate Persily, and Condoleezza Rice, and by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, the Project Liberty Institute, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the Hoover Institution (Stanford).

The chapter authors include Eric Schmidt (formerly at Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and many others, including—to give some names most likely to be familiar to our lawyer readers—Profs. Larry Lessig (Harvard Law), Nate Persily (Stanford Law), and me. Here's a full list, with links:

Erik Brynjolfsson, Alex Pentland, Nathaniel Persily, Condoleezza Rice, and Angela Aristidou, Introduction: Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America
Lawrence Lessig, Protected Democracy
Divya Siddarth, Saffron Huang, and Audrey Tang, A Vision of Democratic AI
Lily Tsai and Sandy Pentland, Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation
Sarah Friar and Laura Bisesto, The Potential for AI to Restore Local Community Connectedness, the Bedrock of a Healthy Democracy
Jennifer Pahlka, AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity
Eric Schmidt, Democracy 2.0
John Cochrane, AI, Society and Democracy: Just Relax
Nathaniel Persily, Misunderstanding AI's Democracy Problem
Eugene Volokh, Generative AI and Political Power
Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl, Techno-Ideologies of the Twenty-First Century
Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Informational GPS
James Manyika, Getting AI Right: A 2050 Thought Experiment

Comments

[Stephen Lathrop]

Just scanning the titles, it looks like cheerleading for AI. But I will withhold that judgment until I learn more.

I do hope a healthy dose of skeptical analysis gets included. A chronic problem pattern with new technologies is they get developed to solve problems, so everything intentionally designed into the technology looks purposeful in a good way, at least at first glance.

The negatives tend to get discovered later, with awareness arriving by happenstance as experience accumulates. Sometimes that awareness builds to dismaying levels, capable to overwhelm the previous optimism.

That could be the case with AI. But I expect that because AI looks like a generalist technology, it will deliver positive outcomes in some cases, negatives in others, and a hell of a lot of controversy sorting out which cases are which.

[ThorsProvoni]

The discussion of crypto was much too brief.

No essay addressed the use of Section 230 to abolish US anti-discrimination law.