The Digitalist Papers: A Vision for AI and Democracy

The speed at which artificial intelligence is developing is mind-boggling. In 2023, industry produced 51 new machine learning models, and large language models became increasingly multimodal. 

These advancements are forcing individuals, companies, and governments to grapple with how to understand, regulate, and deploy the technology.

“There’s never been a technology that has the scale and scope of artificial intelligence,” said Stanford Digital Economy Lab Director Erik Brynjolfsson. “It’s impacting more types of tasks in the economy than ever before, progress is happening faster than ever, and the magnitude of the improvement is simply unprecedented.”

Earlier this year, Brynjolfsson was having conversations with colleagues about The Federalist Papers, a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to promote the ratification of the Constitution. The essays laid out the challenges of the day and provided arguments for institutional innovation for a young democracy.

Today, AI stands to have a tremendous impact on how nations govern, how they engage with their citizens, and how they interact with industry. Policymakers face immediate and immense challenges around how to both work with and regulate this transformational technology.

Brynjolfsson and fellow faculty co-chairs Condoleezza Rice, Nathaniel Persily, and Alex “Sandy” Pentland had an idea: What if they gathered a multi-stakeholder, multidisciplinary group of leaders to create a modern-day Federalist Papers but designed to frame and inform the discourse about AI and governance? 

A few months later, they had assembled a group of 19 essayists (some writing in groups) and are now about to publish what they’re calling The Digitalist Papers. 

“We stand at a technological, economic, and political crossroads that demand creative rebuilding or reinvention of institutions,” said Brynjolfsson. “The Digitalist Papers aims to bridge domains and disciplines by assembling experts from multiple fields – including economics, law, technology, management, and political science – alongside industry and civil society leaders.” 

Contributors were asked to focus their disciplinary expertise to address two key questions: 

• How is the world different now because of AI, and what does that mean for democratic institutions, governance, and governing?
• What is the vision, and what is your strategy to reach this vision? 

Across the volume’s 12 essays, these questions forced a close consideration of the role of AI in the evolving social and democratic landscape, especially in the United States. Each author offers a unique perspective, and collectively, the works put forward a vision in which our democratic institutions and society may not only survive but thrive in a world of powerful digital technologies such as AI. 

Themes span AI and governance, AI and civic engagement, AI regulation, and AI and democratic values. Here’s a brief summary of each essay:

On the changing nature of democracy

• Lawrence Lessig unpacks the assumptions underpinning our current democratic system and pinpoints its key vulnerabilities that AI will affect: the dependence of our democratic representatives on private resourcing and polarization. He advocates for “protected democratic deliberation” as a strategy to safeguard democracy in the AI era.
• Divya Siddarth, Saffron Huang, and Audrey Tang analyzed the Taiwanese experience with digitally enabled citizen assemblies, known as Alignment Assemblies, and put forward a strategy to promote direct citizen engagement toward collaboratively defining the future of AI.
• Lily L. Tsai and Alex “Sandy” Pentland state that if AI raises the voices of constituents through representing them and their communities directly in the broader political sphere, then it may also deliver on the promise of direct democracy at scale.
• Sarah Friar and Laura Bisesto highlight the strategy of digitally mediated engagement as a scaffold for broader, bigger missions in our analog societies.

On new models of governing

• Jennifer Pahlka notes that there is a strong link between diminished state capacity and civic disengagement, and advocates for understanding those constraints and using AI to build government capacity to attain more effective governance.
• Eric Schmidt bluntly makes the case that changing the existing model of organizing within the U.S. government is imperative in order to achieve our government’s purpose.

On AI and regulation

• John H. Cochrane argues that “it is AI regulation, not AI, that threatens democracy.” Free competition, in civil society, media, and academia, will address any ill effects of AI as it has for previous technological revolutions, not preemptive regulation.
• Nathaniel Persily expresses concern that undue panic over AI might, itself, constitute a democracy problem. He argues that exaggerating AI’s impact on the information ecosystem may undermine trust in all media, which would pose a greater cost to democracy than the occasional deepfake.
• Eugene Volokh critically reassesses the risks associated with concentrated power among entities that provide information on public affairs.

On shifting to democratic action

• Mona Hamdy, Johnnie Moore, and E. Glen Weyl advocate for a more inclusive, participatory framework that will integrate diverse perspectives and foster collaboration between technology and human society.
• Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato dive into the governance structures of the AI itself, arguing it is crucial to consider broad, open access, and emphasize individual agency and participatory governance approaches.
• James Manyika concludes the volume with a look to the future and an ambitious agenda. Suppose we look back in 2050 from a society where AI was broadly beneficial. What went right?

Read and share the entire series at the Digitalist Papers website.

Faculty co-chairs of The Digitalist Papers are:

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab
• Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Stanford HAI Fellow and MIT’s Toshiba Endowed Professor
• Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School 
• Condoleezza Rice, 66th Secretary of State of the United States, Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy, and the Denning Professor in Global Business and the Economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business

Senior Editor: Angela Aristidou, Assistant Professor in Strategy & Entrepreneurship at University College London, Visiting Scholar and Digital Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

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