The core message of this book is succinctly captured in one sentence on page 100: “citizen acceptance and trust in AI matters as much as AI capabilities”. There is a lot more covered in Rewiring Democracy that sits behind this statement – the fact that much of our acceptance of artificial intelligence is unwilling or unwitting, and the universal truth that trust is hard won and easily lost.
There are widely opposing views of AI across the political spectrum, and how it will be applied in Irish society. While some see it as a boost for Ireland’s competitiveness, others have concerns about climate, labour displacement, bias and a regulatory system that isn’t fast enough to get ahead of the technology.
Rewiring Democracy spans every element of democracy; from local politics to lawmaking, polls to policy, the campaign trail to the courts. And while caution abounds, sceptics of AI will be challenged by this book. The authors’ excitement for AI is infectious. Their understanding of it helps us to see beyond the deepfakes and disinformation that prevail when we discuss artificial intelligence and democracy, to its full potential of possibilities and risks.
A positive outcome of AI application, for example, could be that by making legislative drafting easier, it might actually be possible to wean lawmakers from their unhealthy reliance on lobbyists – a pernicious issue in the US where the role of lobbyists in the development of legislation is now an accepted norm, but wholly inappropriate in a functioning democracy.
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Some of the best nonfiction books take two distinct areas of knowledge and bring them together. That’s what’s happening here with AI and democracy. When two techies – a cybersecurity expert and a data analyst – get to train their engineer brains on democracy as an information system, and how AI will affect it at every stage, the result makes for fascinating reading.
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Rewiring Democracy goes beyond simple calls for safeguards to AI. It explains that changes can and should be made more fundamentally to democracy: “If we take this opportunity to address the decay in the foundational systems of our democracies, and find clever and responsible uses for AI to shore things up, we may just be able to use this technology to rewire democracy to better serve all of us.”
Sinéad Gibney is a Social Democrat TD for Dublin-Rathdown
