Inclusivity in AI-Enhanced Democracy

This chapter will approach this challenge of balancing the opacity and value of efficiency that often sits at the heart of technology design, with the openness and individual voice required for functional democracy. It will do so by looking at the challenge from a number of different perspectives. The first of these will be the perspective of technological design and data. AI and big data systems are notoriously closed and opaque, and corporate approaches to the collection of training and testing data have not always respected human values and democratic principles. The second perspective will focus on policies and principles, and the way in which we can create a common understanding not just of how these systems should be designed, but the constraints we need to place on how they are used, and with and for whom. Finally, we will look at the way in which both users and policymakers can be encouraged to develop a refined and enhanced sense of critical digital literacy so as to improve both the agency of the end user and the policymaker, fostering the emergence of the model of democracy-in-the-loop through the introduction of production friction.