AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will
It addresses the problem of enhancing deliberative democracy with AI for policymakers and society, but is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
This article examines computational frameworks for finding common ground in collective preferences and explores their potential impacts, cautioning against misguided uses like enabling binding decisions or post-rationalizing political outcomes.
This article unpacks the design choices behind longstanding and newly proposed computational frameworks aimed at finding common grounds across collective preferences and examines their potential future impacts, both technically and normatively. It begins by situating AI-assisted preference elicitation within the historical role of opinion polls, emphasizing that preferences are shaped by the decision-making context and are seldom objectively captured. With that caveat in mind, we explore AI-based democratic innovations as discovery tools for fostering reasonable representations of a collective will, sense-making, and agreement-seeking. At the same time, we caution against dangerously misguided uses, such as enabling binding decisions, fostering gradual disempowerment or post-rationalizing political outcomes.