We seem to be caught in a loop that AI will either save or ruin democracy.

At one extreme, politics scholar David Altman worries that artificial intelligence is leading the world toward an “AI-driven political system in which approval is manufactured, public debate is hollowed out and citizens have no meaningful voice.”

On the other hand, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his head of research, Andrew Sorota, dream that “we must instead use AI to reinvigorate democracy, making it more responsive, more deliberative and more worthy of public trust.”

As upcoming elections in the United States, Canada and Brazil fuel speculation about AI’s impact, I have focused on a deeper question: why is the future of democracy so tied to the future of digital technologies?

How we regard political systems

My book SimPolitics offers a vital history of how we came to think about political systems like computer systems.

I call this “a computational imaginary of politics” that influences how we imagine politics to work, and why we often allow technology experts to serve as experts in politics.

The most tangible example is the current belief that AI can manipulate voters. While controlled experiments show chatbots can change minds, coverage quickly leaps to grand predictions about political transformation.

What matters more than the chatbot is a person’s willingness to discuss politics with a chatbot, something research participants chose to do. In reality, most people ignore efforts to persuade altogether.

Our ability to speculate about politics with technologies like chatbots comes from what what I call the aforementioned computational imaginary of politics.

My book explores how easy it’s become to imagine political change through........

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