The Digitalist Papers
In October of 1787, three New York newspapers started publishing a series of essays written pseudonymously under the pen-name Publius.
The essays were ambitious: they analyzed the greatest challenges of the day, boldly envisioned what the future could be, and provided a roadmap of institutional and political innovation.
The intention of the authors was clear: to promote the ratification of the US Constitution to the people of New York, who had reservations about a strong central government.
In total, Publius published 85 essays between October 1787 and June 1788. The effort was a success—the essays were widely read, the proposed Constitution was ratified in June, and the formation of the new government of the United States began.
Today, the 85 essays are known as the Federalist Papers, and their authors have been identified as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
At a major inflection point in American history, the Federalist Papers were instrumental in ratifying the Constitution and setting in motion the process for the United States to become a new country.
// The Digitalist Papers
What would the Federalist Papers say if they were written in the 21st century? What challenges would they speak to? What roadmap might they lay out?
These questions have inspired a modern-day version of the Federalist Papers, called The Digitalist Papers. Supported by Project Liberty Institute, Hoover Institution, and three Stanford institutions: Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, the Digitalist Papers are a compilation of 12 papers from 19 authors that explore the implications of how artificial intelligence will change democracy in America. Together, they present an array of possible futures that the AI revolution might produce.
At their core, the Digitalist Papers attempt to answer a fundamental question: How is the world different now because of AI, and what does that mean for democratic institutions, governance, and governing?
//
Technology is not destiny. It can be shaped and steered in the direction we want.
//
// Technology is not destiny
At the Digitalist Papers launch event last week at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus, Erik Brynjolfsson from Stanford’s HAI and one of the Digitalist Paper editors said, “technology is not destiny.” It can be shaped and steered in the direction we want, but it takes real effort—effort similar to what Hamilton, Madison, and Jay believed was necessary 236 years ago.
// A sampling from the Digitalist Papers
Here is a sampling of a few of the essays in The Digitalist Papers.
- Audrey Tang (Taiwan’s first Minister of Digital Affairs), Divya Siddarth (Co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project), and Saffron Huang (Co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project) explore digitally enabled “citizen assemblies” and how the Taiwanese experience of citizen assemblies has promoted direct citizen engagement specifically toward collaboratively defining the future of AI.
- Lily Tsai (Founder and Director of MIT’s Governance Lab) and Alex Pentland (Fellow at Stanford HAI) highlight how AI can make huge leaps toward delivering on the promise of direct democracy at scale by ensuring the voices of constituents are represented.
- Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) wrote an essay examining what the role of AI in a democratic government could look like. He proposes actionable strategies for successfully transitioning to a new era of governance where AI recommends courses of action to the humans in charge of government, from local to global levels.
- John Cochrane (Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) argues that “it is AI regulation, not AI, that threatens democracy.” He makes the case that the institutional machinery of regulation cannot artfully guide the development of one of the most uncertain and consequential technologies of our century.
- Nathaniel Persily (law professor at Stanford Law School) suggests that undue panic over AI might, itself, constitute a democracy problem. He argues that exaggerating AI’s impact on the information ecosystem may undermine trust in all media, which would pose a greater cost to democracy than the occasional deepfake.
- Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn) and Greg Beato (technology writer) make the case for broad and open access to AI tools, and to emphasize individual agency and participatory governance approaches. They draw insightful comparisons between the GPS technology and the emerging technologies of generative AI and LLMs.
// Read the Papers
Read the Digitalist Papers here, and reply to this email with your own answer to the question: What does the age of AI mean for democratic institutions, governance, and governing?
.jpg?upscale=true&width=1160&upscale=true&name=pl_essay01%20(1).jpg)
