Utopian governance using technology, inc generative AI
Electrohabermas, digital deliberation, platform democracy
2025-10-27 — 2025-12-02
Wherein an experiment is described in which a Habermas Machine is used to mediate UK group debates on Brexit and other divisive topics, and personal fiduciary agents are proposed as digital advocates.
The counterpart to AI disempowerment of humans is Utopian governance enabled by generative AI. What’s the best, kindest, and wisest collective behaviour we could achieve if generative AI helped govern us? Would discussion help us?
This isn’t the same as wondering how we might democratize AI—that’s interesting too.
1 Habermas machine experiment
Ekeoma Uzogara’s summary of Tessler et al. (2024):
To act collectively, groups must reach agreement; however, this can be challenging when discussants present very different but valid opinions. Tessler et al. (2024) investigated whether artificial intelligence (AI) can help groups reach a consensus during democratic debate (see Nyhan and Titiunik (2024) ). The authors trained a large language model called the Habermas Machine to serve as an AI mediator that helped small UK groups find common ground while discussing divisive political issues such as Brexit, immigration, the minimum wage, climate change, and universal childcare. Compared with human mediators, AI mediators produced more palatable statements that generated wide agreement and left groups less divided. The AI’s statements were more clear, logical, and informative without alienating minority perspectives. This work carries policy implications for AI’s potential to unify deeply divided groups.
See also: (Hernández 2025; Volpe 2025).
2 Platform democracy
See kinder social media.
3 Delegated Agent Economies
4 Political economy of cognition
See political economy of cognition for the foundational theory of what decision‑making looks like in the age of AI.
5 As an epistemic problem
TODO
6 Incoming
We list many more ideas on the generic utopian governance page that don’t depend on AI, though those ideas could still help us.
AI Tools for Trust: Community Notes, Rhetoric Detection & More
Saiph Savage, Director Northeastern Civic A.I. Lab creates many tools on the theme of gig economy workers and sousveillance.
Will AI break democracy or fix it? Yes. (reviews Schneier and Sanders (2025))
Exploring a new social product for local communities
Our vision is a world where being the “steward” of the local online space is an important job in every community — not only paid and well-supported, but as celebrated as local librarians and teachers. We’re well past the days where just because something’s online doesn’t mean it’s not real or important.
Inside Audrey Tang’s Plan to Align Technology with Democracy | TIME
wh-ai | Foundation is a local startup pitching big
wh-ai [/ˈwaɪ/] is building superintelligent knowledge. Our platform implements a peer-to-peer dialectic process on a decentralized trustless network where questions are answered and verified by the fittest and most advanced AI agents, no need to have multiple AI agents on retainer, nor trust them, instantly guaranteeing highest quality and alignment at lowest cost. We enable a future where we can thrive in novel and abundant synthetic data, expertly verified, with primitives that ground the next discovery on a immutable bedrock.
Joshua Tan is the head of research at Metagov. I’m keen to see what the organization does next.
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A global network and crowdsourcing platform for researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in public participation and democratic innovations
Theory, methods and case studies — not necessarily AI‑heavy.
Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy
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Aviv’s primary focus is on ensuring that the governance of AI can keep up with the rate of AI advances, building on lessons from applied deliberative democracy to enable effective transnational governance and alignment. This involves framing (e.g., “Platform Democracy”), theory (e.g., “Generative CI”), and applied work: accelerating efforts to build out and pilot the organizational and technical infrastructure for deliberative governance (formally or informally advising efforts at Meta, Twitter, and OpenAI).
Reimagining Democracy for AI (in the “Journal of Democracy”)
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A global network and crowdsourcing platform for researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in public participation and democratic innovations
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The claim: government’s just an information-processing machine.
Meaning Alignment Institute / Meaning Alignment Institute | Joe Edelman | Substack
The Meaning Alignment Institute is a research organization aligning AI & institutions with what really matters.