New book published

The book Algorithmic democracy, recently published by Springer, addresses the current process of uncritical, immature and despotic algorithmisation of all democratic processes, such as decision-making, law making and enforcement, policy development, citizen participation and public opinion building, as well as the ethical and political challenges it poses for the hyperdigital society.
In its pages, the authors highlight the potential of artificial intelligence to address the current challenges of governance, administration and participation in modern democracies, but also its capacity to automate injustices and widen the inequality gap, favouring men over women, Caucasians over Africans or the rich over the poor.
Algorithmisation, especially that based on generative AI, has become the main response of governments to the challenges facing our democracies. Social and political bots, especially their generative version, colonise the public sphere with synthetic content that perverts and distorts both reality and public opinion. Virtual politicians run as candidates in presidential and municipal elections (Russia, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand), promising neutrality, comprehensiveness and fairness in the face of the self-serving bias that characterises human decision-making. Virtual twins are being presented as the most effective way to address participatory disaffection and the improvement of representative democratic systems. And digital platforms and the cyber-political ecosystems they offer constitute the pillars underpinning the structures of political governance, becoming today’s great centres of despotism.
The consequences of such algorithmic excesses are beginning to be felt in the form of an exponential increase in the perception of human obsolescence, the vulnerability of systems and societies and social entropy, the instrumentalisation of the functional spheres of society and its institutions, the automation of injustices, political irresponsibility, despotism and technological imperialism, moral hardship among the most vulnerable citizens, distrust of the human, among many other things.
According to the authors, behind all of this lies the particular interests of governmental bodies and large technology companies. These use their enormous power to design, promote and disseminate intelligent algorithms with the aim of satisfying strategic and highly instrumental ends, such as maintaining or increasing power, controlling the citizenry, subjugating society, manipulating the vote, muzzling public opinion, provoking compulsive consumption, and so on.
The main problem, according to the authors, is that AI is being given unlimited access to our private and, above all, intimate world. For a decade we have been putting into our homes, our cars, our bodies, a myriad of smart devices that collect our data for large government and technology corporations: robots, mobile phones, speakers, watches, glasses, cameras, headsets, computers and many other AI-enabled technological devices. And the more data AI has, the more vulnerable people, societies and the various functional spheres that, like democracy, it uses to project and develop become. With data, AI generates synthetic discourses capable of segregating the free will of the consumer or electorate to its interests, interests that are clearly not those of the algorithms, but those of the governmental and technological corporations that design and disseminate them with the aim of satisfying their strategic and instrumental ends.
Another fundamental problem, according to the authors, is that the public sphere, the place where citizens use dialogue and deliberation to reach agreements on the meaning of different aspects of democracy, such as the legitimacy of a government’s actions and decisions, has been shifting towards the digital world (such as social networks). This displacement has allowed the hybridisation of the human and the non-human and their algorithmic colonisation, thereby facilitating the possible interference of governments and large corporations through massive synthetic content, echo chambers, bubble filters, etc., which produce fields of distortion of reality.
The war in the Gaza Strip is a clear example of this. Both sides in the conflict have used generative AI to manipulate public opinion by means of synthetic data packets that reproduce information with a high emotional content that has awakened consciences and produced rejection by international society towards one group or the other. The application of this disruptive and distorting potential of Generative AI in a super election year like 2024, where 74 countries around the world will be electing their representatives, can have highly corrosive impacts on democracy on a global scale.
The authors also highlight the problem of shrinking spaces of freedom. The potential of algorithmic democracies is based on the production, collection and exploitation of the massive data of the digitally hyper-connected society. To this end, they apply policies of mass surveillance (mass survellance). This involves the deployment by states of thousands or millions of cameras, sensors and other types of surveillance devices connected to artificial intelligence in public and, in some cases, private space. Through this technological deployment, governments exert increasingly tight and oppressive control over citizens, producing a spiral of silence that slows down or prevents the regeneration, development and health of modern democracies.
Nevertheless, the authors do not advocate paralysing the development of AI, but rather governing it. On the one hand, they advocate promoting a strong civil society and a decoupling of the public sphere and the digital sphere that allows for the recovery of relationality, criticism and agreement on political actions and decisions and the different democratic processes. Public opinion, as proposed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous work Democracy in America, is key to the progress and good health of democratic institutions and, thus, to the development of society. On the other hand, they are committed to developing, applying and implementing self-regulation instruments and mechanisms for the ethical governance of algorithmic democracy, such as codes of ethics and conduct to guide its design and operation, ethics channels to alert or denounce cases of malpractice, ethical audits to verify its correct functioning, or accountability and responsibility reports to render accounts to society of its uses and impacts.