AGI and Democracy in Tech Policy Press

Nineteenth-century painting by Philipp Foltz depicting the Athenian politician Pericles delivering his funeral oration in front of the Assembly superimposed on an AI illustration by Alina Constantin.

2023 was the year of AI, as new products brought recent advances in the field to universal attention, and the world’s most powerful tech companies declared their ambitions to achieve ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ (AGI). 2024 will be the year of democratic elections, with a record-breaking 40-plus countries (including the US, India, UK, Ukraine, Taiwan, and South Africa) representing more than 40% of the world’s population going to the polls. Many are already, justifiably, cautioning about the direct impacts of the former on the latter, as our information and communication environment becomes ever more polluted with AI-generated deepfakes, disinformation, and potentially cyber attacks. How much difference AI will make in 2024 remains an open question. Beyond these immediate threats, however: the advent of AGI could finish democracy once and for all.

Read more on AGI and democracy by Seth Lazar and Alex Pascal, at Tech Policy Press, here: https://www.techpolicy.press/can-democracy-survive-artificial-general-intelligence/