Audrey Tang and Divya Siddarth on Outfitting Democracy for the AI Era

25:05Evaluation is something that we're focusing on now as a good point for collective input, where she said we bring these tens of thousands of people together. And what do they say? This is with civil society organizations, actually. Like, I tried to deploy this chatbot to my 10 ,000 beneficiaries for maternal health in India, and it's having all of these problems. It's always saying we should call a hotline. There are no hotlines here. That's crazy. Like, we have to change this. Otherwise, people are not getting the help they need. So we're gathering tons of that information and creating benchmarks and trying to improve models on those benchmarks.

25:37So that's another way. In our recent global dialogues, we found one in three adults are using AI for emotional support weekly. People trust chatbots far more than their elected representatives and basically more than any other institution they interact with other than their family doctor. so what does this mean for the future that we're going to build on one hand lots of concerning things about that on the other it's clear that there's already trust here how do we leverage that so the last thing is uh can we use ai to make this stuff better like that's what we're excited about with remesh with these platforms we're using is how do we actually build the technology into being able to do listening much better than we currently do better than polling You know, part of what I infer from your work is to say, well, when people are engaged, actually being kind of respected and intrigued in their point of view, there's a much larger percentage of people that kind of want to, you know, build those bridges or get to bridging comments or to kind of figure that out.

26:44And if you have high quality moderation and dialogue participant, that that could be helpful. And that's the kind of thing that is part of a, you know, kind of a positive future that I would hope for. But it's kind of one of the things that, you know, maybe it's naive for me to be hopeful for. But the kind of notion of taking what we do in very limited circumstances, which to have extremely highly trained moderators facilitating conversation. And just like AI makes things cheaper everywhere, to make that cheaper across a whole wide variety. Have you guys speculated about that at all? Yeah, it's no longer sci-fi.

27:25In Bowling Green, for example, in Kentucky, just this year, there's a project called What Could BGB? They used the same system, the Bridging System Polis, to shape the city's 25-year plan. And despite the sometimes polarized nature of American discourse, the platform revealed overwhelming uncommon ground on key issues like preserving historic buildings, investing in public health, building a cultural identity different from the nearby Nashville, and so on. And nearly 8 ,000 residents participated, showing that even in such hyperlocal communities, these shared values can be surfaced and mobilized.

28:03And the key part of this is the open source Jigsaw SenseMaker that was deployed as part of the Polis system. So previously, if you have tens of thousands of those groups and so on, it takes a while for people to go in and figure out what topics, what sub-topics are within it. But now using language models, you can do it and you can replicate that using the open source equivalent model like Gemma or Mistral running on laptops. You can verify these biases and correct them if you want. Audrey, it seems like there's so much that the United States can learn from what you're doing in Taiwan. Are there sort of favorite use cases you have for using AI to sort of increase the civic participation you think could be exported elsewhere or what are the challenges in doing that?

28:48I think the idea that Taiwan was the largest model is no longer true this year. In California, we launched Engaged California, and California is like twice larger than Taiwan. And the platform was used successfully to tackle contentious issues like wildfire recovery, how to build back better, and so on. And already in the city of Tokyo, there was a 33-year-old science fiction author called Takahiro Anno, a machine learning expert, who read the book Plurality that we co-authored. And he decided to run for Tokyo governor one month before the governor election. And he just crowdsourced his platform, literally using polis and broad listening tools.

29:31And again, using AI as a great real-time summarizer, you can call into a line to talk to the vocal clone of Takahiro Anno and see him updating his platform in real time on YouTube 24-7. And just before voting independently ranked the platforms by those think tanks, the Takahiro Anno platform crowdsourced was the top-rated platform, better than even Koike-san's. Hi, Google Gemini here to provide some context. Yuriko Koike is a Japanese politician who has served as the governor of Tokyo since 2016. Her past policy efforts and ongoing concerns for Tokyo suggest a continued emphasis on issues such as disaster prevention, combating declining birth rates, and maintaining Tokyo's global competitiveness.

30:16She was re-elected for a third term in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election. Of course, Koike-san won the election, but Koike also tapped Takahiro Anno to advise GovTech Tokyo to use this kind of assistance to, again, imagine Tokyo for 2050. And so Tokyo, California, we're now having a lot of larger playgrounds that are larger than 23 millions of Taiwan. I feel like a lot of time in the U.S., you have sort of a moment of public comment, you have community meetings, and specifically thinking about the NIMBY movement, what you often have in the U.S. is the loudest voices reign. You have homeowners in a community who come to a community meeting and they're the people who might pick up that phone and comment on something if, you know, people are soliciting information.

31:01How do you prevent it so it's not just those loud voices or lobbied interests get to sort of take over that platform? Right. In broadcasting networks, especially on social media, people are either imbies or nimbies. And those voices, the more extreme they are, the more virality they get. But in conversation networks, in group of 10, statistically representative of that population, the opposite happens. People become memebies, like maybe in my backyard. People start negotiating different terms because people know only those bridging ideas from that 10 people group will get amplified across other groups and post-pollinate.

31:41So it is very important they're incentivized to find that uncommon ground within the group so that they can gain the virality. So by designing the system differently for broad listening, not broadcasting, you get completely different behavior. One of the other things that you nodded to here that is critical is transparency. So, you know, who is making the money here? What are their motives behind this? And so I wanted to get really specific. Actually, Audrey, I would love to hear from you. during COVID, you opened up like real-time mass supply data and let hackers audit it. So can you talk about which metric convinced you that this radical transparency was literally saving lives and was an important component of the whole process?

32:24So when it comes to Musk, for example, in COVID, transparency is absolutely necessary, but it's just the beginning. We did make it very easy for people using any of those apps developed by civic technologists to look at where the nearest pharmacy hosting the some masks are, how quickly do they replenish, whether this distribution is fair, and so on. But equally importantly is that when people discovered, for example, initially when we designed a distribution algorithm, we prided ourselves in saying each person in Taiwan on average have a very similar distance to the next available mask. That was the optimization target.

33:05But then an opposition legislator specializing in data science pointed out not everywhere travel the same speed. So in places with very good metro, for example, the same distance is 10 minutes. But in a rural place, the same distance may take you an hour. And that is actually not fair at all. But the great thing about having historic data published every 30 seconds is that then the minister at the time asked the legislator back, well, you are the expert. How about let's design something that make it much more equal? And she couldn't refuse because she has exactly the same data as the minister.

33:43And so they co-created. And within a week, we wrote a much more fair distribution mechanism. So when we get to the algorithmic transparency and you think about AI, do you Do you think it's important to include model weights or is kind of like process transparency enough? And part of it's because, you know, I do think that one of the things about the model weight stuff is it kind of puts out a very powerful computation. It's almost like saying here's a hacking tool or something that puts it out in the wild. And I tend to be hesitant. I'm curious about what does it take for transparency and trust?

34:16And if Audrey and Divya, if either of you have thought about this and if you have insight. Well, in Taiwan, when we run the alignment assemblies, people prefer tailor-made models, not general purpose, very large models, but the ones that are very good in just doing one thing and do it well. For example, translation between Taiwanese Mandarin and English, so that it's not just translating the content, but also the local culture and nuances and so on. And to do that, it probably does not need penetration testing, red-semming, and the other cyber or bio capabilities. And so while we do have very large models, nowadays in Taiwan, our industrial policy around AI is to reuse those models, but to tune specific smaller models through distillation, through synthetic data training, and so on for specific applications.

35:10And those models, because they have less dual-use risks, can then afford to be much more open-weight or even entirely open-source. What do you think are the other current challenges we have in transferring some of these practices from Taiwan? Like, how can we mitigate those barriers for why people aren't taking you up on all of the amazing things that you guys are doing? So collective intelligence, to me, is about exercising mutual care through the civic muscle. And like any muscle, it can be trained and strengthened significantly with patience and practice. However, there is this strain of techno-solutionism that is very impatient.

35:49There are some people who say, let's just have chat GPT, interview random people one-on-one for a while, and then we build their avatars, and then we put those avatars on the deliberation. And from that point onward, you don't need to check with real people anymore. and this is much better than any polling because there's group dynamics and so on. And that vision is like, you know, sending your robot to the gym to train for you. I'm sure it's very impressive. The robot can lift a very heavy weight. At the end of the day, though, the civic muscle atrophies because there's no exercising in listening.

36:23And I think one of the main hurdles was that this kind of technosolutionism, this shortcut is also capturing some politicians' imaginations. And so we need to work with their expectations and show, actually, this kind of sick muscle exercise can be done as quickly as emerging technologies. So you do not need to skip those important steps and end up with the avatar state. As someone who's worked with Audrey in Taiwan and then has tried to bring this to other contexts, I think one difficulty is Taiwan has built up this collective intelligence infrastructure over 10 years, which means when we run a process in Taiwan, people who are involved believe that it will go somewhere.

37:05And I think this is really crucial. And it's why at CIP, we make sure we never run a collective process. We don't know what the outcome is going to be. And we can't say that back to people, even if the outcome is you're going to be involved in an evaluation, you're going to impact this decision at a company. We're going to bring this to the government, whatever it is. And that's because I think there is one, there's cynicism about participation. There's a great Oscar Wilde quote that I say a lot, which is, I love democracy, but it takes too many evenings. Like, of course, it's not what we want to be spending our time on.

37:36Even if you do want to participate, you want to make sure it's going somewhere. And I think in a country where that is clear already, there is a much higher desire to participate and higher quality of participation. Forget country. In any context where that's not clear, you're not going to get excellent and helpful participation. And so I think that is what we also need to work on is success stories of collective intelligence informing things. And the more that happens, the more there's an upward spiral saying, hey, this can actually work. I would spend an evening on this, perhaps. Or I would create a digital twin to spend an evening on this, which is also something we're thinking.

38:09Say more about the creating digital twins to spend evenings with. Very interesting. Hey, read AI here. I'm invested in this answer, too. Let's hear it. Well, because I'm kind of obsessed with this question of how do we preserve human agency in a world where it's a lot of work to weigh in on and understand any topic. And we don't want to erode what is core about being human. We don't want to be doing laundry and outsourcing the task of self-governance to AI. The idea of a digital twin is can you create an agent that can negotiate on behalf of your values and preferences in a ton of democratic contexts?

38:42I think, Reid, to your earlier point about market solutions, some version of a quote-unquote digital twin is going to be solved by the market. It's valuable to have something that can negotiate on your behalf in an agent-based economy, even if that negotiation is pretty logistics-based. Something like that will happen. The question is, how do we know it's actually true to our values? What does it mean to be true to your values in a world where you learn things or you say something different when you're hungry than when you're full or you say something different when you're afraid than when you're not?

39:11So a lot of we're trying to build evaluations for digital twins using some of the global dialogues data to have people from different places be able to interact with the agents that are trained on their preferences and say, this is what I would say. This isn't what I would say. This isn't what I would say, but actually I like it better than what I would say. And trying to get to the point where even if the market does solve some version of this, we're actually evaluating those and using those for what people truly value. And maybe we can save everyone some evenings and also save democracy. Both evenings in democracy.

39:41I thought one of the areas you might have also been going is the Groucho Marx, but which I also like don't want to be part of any club that wants to have me as a member, which also has some echoes here. I wanted to ask you both a question. I'm curious, like AI and democracy. Are you optimistic? Are you pessimistic? I know we've talked about this on other occasions. We've talked about the hopeful case here. Obviously, that's my day job. So I spend my days being hopeful. But yeah, I'm curious what your high level bird's eye take is on not just nation state democracy and AI in the next two years, but is transformative AI going to lead to a more or less kind of democratic society?

40:20I think the main problem we have right now is trust in government, full stop. And if people don't trust government, they're not going to vote for it. They're not going to want more of it. And people aren't entirely wrong. In the U.S., the government does a lot of great things, but they also fail so many times. And so if AI can help the government deliver, if AI can make the government more efficient, more effective, sort of all of these things, then I am incredibly hopeful for this being a positive because this trust issue is the thing that I care most about. Obviously, the trusting is something I also feel very strongly.

40:57Part of the reason why, you know, kind of doing this challenge with the Lever for Change organization about restoring trust in public organizations. The thing that I generally think about optimism, and I think people kind of think that I tend to be optimistic for almost political reasons, but I actually think that the optimism is we only get to futures that are good by steering directly towards them. So I think rationally, you need to be optimistic in your efforts, in your intent, in your angle. Now, that being said, obviously, it's intelligently optimistic. It's, you know, recognizing there are challenges, recognizing that there's a number of forces that could make things go wrong and that you have to put in real energy to try to make your optimism bear fruit, to make it that way.

41:41That's part of the reason why I'd say, yes, I am optimistic, even though I can see a number of different ways in which AI can challenge democracy, can challenge people's buy-in to democracy, people's buy-in to society with the job transformations. In a way, the primary impact of AI and democracy is economic, right? And so I think it's really important to bring that piece in. I completely agree. If I could squeeze another one in. One question we ask in our global dialogues is sometimes, if you could delegate this decision to one person or institution, who would you choose? Just to try to understand in a different way what people want.

42:15We recently did one with the Earth Species Project. And in the pilot, people are always like, nature decisions? Jane Goodall, 100%. It's incredible how big the distance is between that and someone else. I'm wondering on assuming some type of centralization, this is something we think about a lot, right? Like what's the leverage point for democracy if it's the bitter lesson all the way down and some parts of the architecture are just going to be centralized? If you could delegate more control over the centralized architecture to one like institution, let's say, because person is a bit difficult, who comes to mind that you'd want to be more involved that isn't?

42:50obviously if we could get a collection of buddhist monks together that might be an institution that i'd say okay that group that would work uh i would say no part of it is maybe i'm irreducibly pragmatic about what actually works and since it tends to be the i don't know how we have not yet despite all idealism assemble any other way of doing scale technology than companies i kind of resolve that to a company question. And maybe just because I'm close to the kind of Microsoft processes by being on the board, you know, I tend to have a very high trust for Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, Mustafa Suleiman in what they're doing.

43:34I know where they've integrated their theses. Now, if it's stepped outside of that, you know, I was also on the OpenAI board. So I actually, in fact, have a lot of trust for OpenAI, but I also know Dario Amadai quite well. You know, So he was at OpenAI, so Anthropic, I have a high trust for. The Google folks with Demis Asabas and DeepMind folks and James Munyeka, I think, also do this very well. And so I actually work towards the answer to your question, which is getting these folks in dialogue with each other, trying to share best practices and ideas, safety tests as ways of doing it as a way of kind of operationalizing.

44:10Like literally all the people I just mentioned to you are people I'm in deep dialogue with about this. And that's part of the reason I have an answer. Now, picking just one, I try not to. I try to get a little bit of the collective intelligence. Like, I'm a strong believer in what you guys are doing in terms of collective intelligence and that kind of pattern. So I always try to say, hey, let's try to make it a group of people in dialogue. As a matter of fact, one of the questions I ask the version of the question you just asked me kind of regularly of, okay, what's your list of people if you don't create, quote unquote, AGI?

44:43what's your list of other people who you would want to have done that if you're not the person who have done it okay so let's do one-third c-suite one-third buddhist monks one-third global public perfect i'm into that we'll call it a day

45:05and so let's turn to rapid fire is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future. Well, there's a line from Leonard Cohen's song, Anson, goes like this. Ring the bells that still can't ring. Forget your perfect offering. There's a crack, a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. To me, this is the most optimistic idea. It tells that progress does not come from flawless, top-down plans. It comes from embracing our imperfections, allowing new possibilities to emerge from the cracks? I'm going to go science fiction, but actually there are some beautiful explorations of democracy in books like A Half-Built Garden, The Dispossessed, like Terra Ignota, that say, what if you actually used these technologies to counter human flaws instead of magnifying them, which is something we've been talking about.

45:57I think why Terra Ignota in particular is something that fills me with optimism is there's a group of people called the Utopians in the Terra Ignota series. And I've been thinking a lot about what it means to reclaim the title of utopian, which I think is often used to dismiss people as naive and idealistic, and for a good reason. The world is really hard, and there are good reasons for it, and it's hard to build utopia. But I think it's important to have an end goal. And in Terra Agnota, this group, they have, you know, they're scientists, they're explorers, they want to defeat death, they want to go to the stars, and they build towards humanity flourishing every day.

46:31And that, I think, is something that is within every person I've spoken to. And bringing that energy together is something that gives me optimism. Audrey, I will go to you first. Is there a question that you wish people would ask you more often? At the beginning of our projects, I wish that everybody would ask, what do you think is possible to achieve if everything works out very well in the next 15 years? That question to me changes dynamic from doom to bloom. Divya? I wish people would ask me more questions that come from a belief that things can get better. I think in particular with democracy, it is easy to look around and see the failures of democracy.

47:11There are tons of them. And if we asked ourselves the question of how do we build on top of this and improve, however you feel about democracy, if you want to preserve what we have now, ask yourself the question of how we can do better. And if you think we should throw it all away, ask yourself the question of what we would lose. If we all asked ourselves the question of how we can make it work, I believe that it would. Well said as an optimist. Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your quote-unquote industry that inspires you? I'm really inspired by the global movement toward shorter work weeks.

47:43We're seeing major pilots and policy shifts from the UK, from Belgium, Iceland, and most recently Tokyo in Japan, showing that four-day work week can increase productivity and cutting stress and burnout. And I think the civic potential really excites me. An extra free day gives people bandwidth to join citizen assemblies, to contribute to open source, to mentor neighbors. And so time is the raw material of collective intelligence. And redesigning the calendar is a reminder that not all the gov tech is tech. Sometimes the most profound change begins with something as simple as giving back time.

48:21Divya? I think there are two things here. One, I'm constantly inspired by how the billions of people around the world take technology innovation and make it work for them. We said we did these evaluations across India. Obviously, evals are about finding failure modes. But every time we went to an organization to ask them about failure modes, they were using language models in super complex ways. They had downloaded Lama on a laptop that was running without internet. All of these kinds of ways of using technology that we don't think about enough and we don't build for enough. The other thing is science fiction futures are possible.

48:54That's always going to be exciting to me. Like I take Waymos now, you know, and I think a lot about how how can we push the frontier and make the frontier accessible to people? How can we not have this dichotomy between like, OK, we keep pushing the frontier and it doesn't get down to people, nor like we ignore the frontier because we care about what everyone else gets. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what is our first step to get there? And Divya, why don't you start this time? I think we can move from a future of artificial general intelligence to a future of augmented collective intelligence.

49:29And I think the first step to get there is to bring people and technology together to surface our best ideas and use AI to put them into action. I totally agree with that. I think a change of perspective is all it takes. We need to remember that the superintelligence we're waiting for is not in the server form somewhere. It is already here. We the people are the superintelligence. And our mission is not to look for a mission to save us. It's to increase our own bandwidth, to strengthen our connection, to build the civic muscle, to allow our collective intelligence to emerge. And the first step could be just turning to the person next to you, online or in person, and begin a better conversation.

50:09Amazing. Thank you both so much. This was really incredible and so much to think about. Appreciate it.

50:18Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Tanasi Delos, Sarah Schleid, Vanessa Handy, Aaliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno-Gimenez and Mulea Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. And last but not least, a big thanks to Wendy Sue.