Observing and shaping the world with data

In which we discuss three further areas where artificial intelligence begins to touch on democracy: equality, elections, and the systemic competition between democracy and autocracy.

At the individual level, AI impacts the conditions of democratic self-rule and people’s opportunities to exercise it.

The successful application of artificial intelligence depends on a set of preconditions.

The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology’s economic, social, and political consequences. The most recent step in AI development -- the application of large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models to the generation of text, image, video, or audio content -- has come to dominate the public imaginary of AI and has accelerated this discussion. But to assess AI’s societal impact meaningfully, we need to look closely at the workings of the underlying technology and identify the areas of contact within democracy.

In this episode, we focus on remaining fears and challenges associated with algorithms: bubbles and loops, the alignment problem, and opaqueness. We close the discussion of algorithms by an account what can be done to improve their uses in society.

In this episode, we focus on algorithmic action and fairness.

Algorithms are also used to provide suggestions and advice.Iit is helpful to differentiate between algorithms providing advice and suggestions to experts and those providing advice and suggestions for lay people and users of digital communication environments and services.

Algorithms are sets of steps by which to solve pre-defined tasks. Today the term appears predominantly in connection with computing. Algorithms allow computers to perform tasks. They are crucial in the advances of computer-enabled analysis and automation.

This episode sketches the tensions that arise from the drive to generate data-enabled insights and people's expectations and rights to privacy.

Data provide a reduced representation of the world and promise to uncover hidden patterns and connections between entities that remain invisible in their full, unreduced manifestation in the world. This allows people and organizations to make sense of the world, and increase their level of control.