What do you think of the definition in the paper?

And there's a great paper by @_FelixSimon_ and Sacha Altay on the actual impact of generative AI on elections. And more that I'll be writing about later, (incl great art from Seb Krier).
Read them all at buff.ly/zTrRirO. Thanks so much to @knightcolumbia (and especially Katy) for making it happen

My symposium on AI & Democratic Freedoms (edited with @katygb.bsky.social) is shaping up amazingly. @random_walker and @sayashk 's already influential 'AI as Normal Technology' is there. So is @danielsusskind's insightful investigation of what will remain for humans to do in our automated future.

Building democratic resilience for the era of AI agents, and for AGI beyond, is an urgent challenge. If you're building civic agents, I'd love to talk.

The paper—written with the visionary Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar—is published here: buff.ly/dMM0r7K

More important still, if we want to preserve democratic values in this radical period of transition, is to make democratic institutions more resilient to the changes ahead. This can't just be about going back to how things were. Their stressors are not all exogenous.

But computing has always been janus-faced for democracy, and this time won't be different. We could build civic agents that advance democratic values and disrupt concentrated power. Some features of modern AI could help. But civic agents must be built, they're not the default.

And there will be novel threats—the erosion of cognitive autonomy, accelerated cyberwarfare, the ability for executives to wear the administrative state like a mech suit that implements without question their every whim.

Soaring inequality? Check.
Concentration of corporate power? Also check.
Stuffed-up information ecosystem? Yep that too.
Backsliding as the 'autocratic legalism' playbook gets rolled out in one nation after the next? Agents could be a helpful software Stasi.

Capable LLM-based agents are already here. For any domain where you can build a good RL verifier, current knowledge will get us to human-level performance and better. Further advances are on the horizon. Agents are bound to exacerbate the trends already stressing democracies.