In Episode 8 of the Beyond Electric Sheep podcast on AI, Ed Daniels and Brick Thompson spend 8 minutes discussing how AI could be used to enhance democracy. News broadcasts constantly talk about the negative effects of social media and AI on our society. But there may be ways to use AI to help citizens participate more effectively in government decision making. In the local context, AI meeting summarizers could transcribe neighborhood meeting discussions and extract key points and arguments. These key points and arguments would then be passed along to other neighborhoods as well as up to the city council and mayor. Through an AI-driven iterative process, the participants would move closer to consensus, and decisions could be arrived at faster with more transparency.
Ed had a several inspirations for his thinking on this. One was David Shapiro’s YouTube episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6wYM-nvK_Y. In addition, there are three Arxiv.org articles supporting the required technology including https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.15793.pdf , https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04928 , and https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13007.
The name of our podcast, Beyond Electric Sheep, is a reference to the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. That novel is the source for the movies Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). It explores the themes of artificial intelligence, empathy, and reality in a dystopian future where humans and androids coexist. The novel raises the question of whether androids can dream or feel anything at all, and whether they are different from humans in any meaningful way. In our Beyond Electric Sheep podcast we go beyond the novel and the movies and discuss the broader implications and applications of artificial intelligence in our personal lives and in our businesses. We explore the pragmatic as well as the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from creating and interacting with intelligent machines.
Beyond Electric Sheep is also available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYg2J0jET_BPCKSnsxz8mleEmYogYJZhn