Description
This paper reflects on the premises, promises, and perils of AI for democracies. It builds upon my previous work (Kaul, 2022) on how AI is altering the geographies of our knowledge about ourselves and the world, affecting how we make sense of our experience as we interface with digital and real entities, deciding what we can access, and curating what and who we can care for. The link between technologies and politics is important, since people are often “willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accord with technological innovation at the same time they would resist similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds” (Winner 1980: 135). Technologies as order-making processes involve complex questions of consent, power, and inter-relationality. The increasing resort to AI technologies across the board, including in governance and public policy, continues unabated despite concerns about ethical fairness and explanatory transparency. AI is transforming the democratic imagination and reshaping both economic organisation and political reasoning in diverse societies. This paper, thus, focuses on the political-cognitive intersection of what AI means for the democratic societies, which are globally uneven in terms of institutional strength, media freedoms, resilience of inequalities, and access to legal recourse.
