I posted yesterday about AI and taxation and I’ve been thinking further about AI’s societal impact, as well as reading the scenarios produced by the Windfall Trust.
That helped me realise that we are at an unusually powerful moment for well-designed citizen participation work to have impact on the future of AI and democracy.
Looking at Windfall’s scenarios, it is clear that no one knows quite where are going to end up. Unlike climate change – serious, slow, clear direction of travel – the AI transformation is moving quickly but its long-term results are still uncertain.
Speciflcally, we don’t know for sure who the ultimate winners will be.
Will OpenAI and Anthropic corner the market in advanced models, or will open weight and open source solutions destroy their business model with good-enough alternatives?
Will businesses profit massively from firing junior staff and automating coding and documentation processes, or will they need to hire more people to manage the hugely increased flow of AI-generated documentation?
Will workers find themselves commoditised, sidelined or unemployed, or will the new threat to jobs re-energise trade union and worker movements to ensure labour increases its share of GDP?
That uncertainty is what makes the moment powerful. The future coalitions have not yet formed, people and organisations have not entrenched their positions – we know that things will change, but we don’t know how they will change.
So we are in a Rawlsian moment. John Rawls proposed a philosophical approach to justice called “the original position” – what sort of society would you design if you were behind a “veil of ignorance” and didn’t know what position in society you would end up in?
That’s where we are, and it’s where Sam Altman is, along with every worker or community that might see disruption from AI. So now is the time to create the conversation about what that future might look like, and build the structures of resilience that make it more likely to come about.
As a democracy guy, I’m interested in how the economic and social changes AI will bring about will flow through into politics and democracy – whether through the loud voices of very rich people, or the collective voices of community.
Many of us working on democratic innovation are focused on using AI for participation events, or are concerned about bad information spread by AI. Others, including my colleagues at Democratic Society, are working on how to create good governance arrangements for AI use.
In this Rawlsian moment, though, we have an opportunity to think about what desirable post-AI futures might look like, and what investment we need in democratic and information infrastructures now – before the real social and economic impact hits, and when positions have not yet completely hardened.
There are lessons to be learned from another equally disruptive but slower-moving process – climate change. In my next post, I’ll think about how citizen participation in just transition thinking can and cannot be a model for shaping a democratic future after the AI transition.