Stanford University's Digital Economy Lab has unveiled "The Digitalist Papers," a collection of essays exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and democratic governance. The project, announced on September 24, brings together 19 experts from various fields to examine how AI is reshaping society and offer strategies for preserving democratic values in the digital age.
Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of Stanford's Digital Economy Lab and a faculty co-chair of the project, emphasised the unprecedented scale and scope of AI's impact. "There's never been a technology that has the scale and scope of artificial intelligence," Brynjolfsson said. "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."
Inspired by The Federalist Papers, which argued for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, The Digitalist Papers aims to frame and inform discourse about AI and governance. The project addresses two key questions: how AI is changing the world and its implications for democratic institutions, and what vision and strategies are needed to navigate these changes.
The 12 essays in the collection cover a range of themes, including the changing nature of democracy in the AI era, new models of governing with AI, approaches to AI regulation, and shifting towards democratic action in an AI-driven world. Contributors include prominent figures such as Lawrence Lessig, Eric Schmidt, and James Manyika, offering diverse perspectives on topics like digital citizen assemblies, government capacity building, and the potential risks of overregulating AI.
The project's faculty co-chairs include Brynjolfsson, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Nathaniel Persily, and former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Angela Aristidou, an Assistant Professor at University College London and Visiting Scholar at Stanford, serves as the Senior Editor.
As AI continues to advance rapidly, with 51 new machine learning models produced in 2023 alone, The Digitalist Papers seeks to provide a framework for understanding and addressing the complex challenges at the intersection of technology and democracy.The complete series is available on the Digitalist Papers website.