Article Excerpt:
Tech and democracy are not friends right now. We need to change that — fast.
As I’ve discussed previously in this series, social media has already knocked a pillar out from under our democratic institutions by making it exceptionally easy for people with extreme views to connect and coordinate. The designers of the Constitution thought geographic dispersal would put a brake on the potential power of dangerous factions. But people no longer need to go through political representatives to get their views into the public sphere.
Our democracy is reeling from this impact. We are only just beginning the work of renovating our representative institutions to find mechanisms (ranked choice voting, for instance) that can replace geographic dispersal as a brake on faction.
Now, here comes generative artificial intelligence, a tool that will help bad actors further accelerate the spread of misinformation.