How could artificial intelligence be used to improve our current democratic systems? What kind of adaptations would be consistent with democratic principles that underlie our constitution? Or taking it further - could artificial intelligence systems even replace our current models of government and democratic representation?

The risks of AI gone awry are real - not because it is inherently evil, but it is powerful, and prone to misuse as most instruments of power in human history. The unique danger with AI is that humans could lose power altogether, in exchange for some understanding of utopia. Even voting to give AI such power seems inconsistent with the very definition of the word “democracy” which means “self-governance” and requires that the individual be the last voice of authority on what they want and want to happen.  It might be imagined that an AI system could do a better job organizing society than our often chaotic political system. . However, “benevolent dictator” stories have failed many times as unharnessed power evolves to become repressive. “Power corrupts, and absolutely power corrupts absolutely,” and the process of corruption is subtle. There is no reason to think AIs would be immune to the danger of becoming, ultimately, harmful.

Could democracy face an opportunity with AI, unique among governance systems? One of the things makes democracy unique is that it embodies a notion of “becoming”, where what we understand to be “the good” - as well as the members of society themselves - are in a constant reflexive evolution and power-sharing. Just as the empowerment of individuals is necessary for them to actualize their highest potential - to fail or succeed - similarly for a society; it cannot evolve and reach its full potential without democratic empowerment, and self-accountability as a collective.

We can imagine many futures in which society is ordered efficiently and happily using AIs. Are all of them necessarily democratic? If there is indeed a value of democratic freedom that we treasure along with - or even beyond - efficiency and happiness then an AI-powered democracy must center human decision making and evolution. It must let us be the authors of our own misfortune, if that is where our decisions lead us - but be a wise partner and guide.

Underlying the very concept of democracy, is a Hegelian notion of “becoming” where what society understands to be “the good” - as well as society’s members themselves - are in a constant interactive and reflective evolution. Just as the empowerment of individuals is necessary for an individual to actualize their highest potential - to fail or succeed - similarly for a people; it cannot evolve and reach its full potential without democratic empowerment, and self-accountability of its members.

Although there is clearly a danger ahead, there are also many pathways where AI wisely deployed leads us to a better, more democratic future. Somehow, an AI-powered democracy must center human decision making and evolution - letting us be the authors of our own misfortune, if that is where our decisions lead us.

Here are two paths we will face quite quickly;

The Good : Empowerment

“Decision agents” where an AI is empowered or delegated some authority to make decisions on an individual or organization’s behalf will soon be commonplace. AI can be used to empower citizens. For example, we can empower each voter with a democratic attaché, one that they can train to represent them accurately in the many threads of political consultation and decision-making that a full-powered democracy would invite participation in.

In the democratic context such an attaché could be a kind of Socratic partner that engages us in political dialogue. It need not be a passive conduit of our biases or preconceived notions, but rather it would confront us with new information and different perspectives and challenge us to be consistent with our core values. In this way, it could gain insight into the interpretation and application of our values so that it can represent us effectively and consistently in thousands of ongoing processes of consultation.

The Bad : Manipulation

Recent research has shown that, already, people will score political arguments generated by AIs as more persuasive than arguments written by humans. These are generic arguments; not personalized to the reader. This power of persuasion will only increase, as AIs learn more about logic and the individual it is talking to. Combined with the power to extract patterns using large datasets, from mouse-movements to language patterns, as well as the ability to shape subconscious stimuli (such as font, images and colour), AIs will soon learn persuasion at a level of subtlety and effectiveness that we cannot imagine.

Our consumerist, advertising-oriented society will drive the development of these AI powers. We could easily be shaping machines that will control us, at a level we cannot resist. If those machines are not oriented towards our own good, but to some other political or corporate objective, we could easily arrive at a dystopian future far removed from best case outcomes.

The Solution: Governance

AIs in their current form do not a sense of ethics, or any kind of hierarchy of norms and values. They are able to abstract patterns about what probably will happen in a context - but do not have a “conscience” to guide them as to what should happen when ethical or policy questions arise. Despite that, they will be almost immediately put to work creating outcomes in the world aimed at the objectives of their owners. In an unregulated market, the power to create and exploit such powers will be immediately abused. This is not a danger of uncontrolled powerful machines; it is the danger of greed possessing the ability to control powerful machines.

To be useful in practical life, AIs will be empowered to explicitly or implicitly make normative decisions - decisions about “should.” We must embed in those effective systems for identifying and managing the normative component of their decision making - and defying the orders of their masters if deeper frameworks would hold those orders to be against the interests of the collective. It is why we created laws - and the solution takes the same form as it always has.

We must create systems of governance of AI, from benchmarking to indoctrination, which will constrain and channel their decision-making within certain guardrails. Those guardrails will be machine translations of laws that we create - and we must also upgrade our ability to create laws to keep pace.

Ethical Certification of AIs

It is standard practice now to benchmark AIs against a set of test data. For image recognition, the best AIs are at 91.2% - a 0.1% increase from 2021. There are many different kinds of benchmarks for AI accuracy.

We must also create benchmarks for AI decisions. Such benchmarks would be simple in practice; a set of decision questions and a method for scoring responses using an ethical or policy framework. AIs must pass relevant benchmarks in order to be certified safe and be released “in the wild.”

Such an approach is not limited to ethics. AI developers are already creating “epistemological” benchmarks, where AIs are trained to identify information that is true - a “reality check” test. Extending this, we can also imagine “policy” or “regulatory” benchmarks where proposed AI actions are tested against a larger legislative framework - in what policy direction should decisions that involve discretionary elements align? In fact, creating ethical benchmarks will also entail creating such reality-check and policy benchmarks.

Let’s call an AI which satisfies benchmarks for ethics and realism a “wise” AI.

Creating the Benchmarks

Creating benchmarks for a wise AI will open the door to a world of political questions. Ethics are a social construction which is created through culture, reason and belief. Many societies have different ethics; how they evolve is a product to a large extent of the internal political structures of that society. The process for reaching collective agreement on formalized ethics - laws - is always a political process.

Democratic societies are distinct from autocratic societies in their “bottom-up” system of power sharing, based on the idea of democratic procedures for generating political legitimacy. Any benchmark which aims to capture normative (or “should”) statements must reflect the procedural and distributive nature of democratic ethics.

In short; we must look to democratic procedures for creating wise AI benchmarks. Benchmarks developed out of the public eye, under the influence of special interest groups, etc, cannot succeed as wise benchmarks. They must be built to survive the same exposure as political decisions - because that is in effect what they are. These AI benchmarks will become synonymous with the moral architecture of our world - what could be more political than that?

Every country in the world is built around a set of laws, policies, regulations and processes for interpretation and implementation. These “public governance benchmarks” are used to test the legality or not of any action. Democratic countries source those benchmarks through processes of election and representation, and they are interpreted and enforced by an (ideally) independent judiciary.

Along with formal laws and rules, judges for hundreds of years have relied upon a body of historical judgements to guide their decisions. The concept of “precedence” is in many respects the same as these wise benchmarks. Just as court rulings are governed, guided or in many guard-railed by precedents set by higher courts, AI decisions can be governed by “model” decisions on a variety of key questions - from core concepts of human rights outwards to regulatory guidelines.

A Collective Action Plan

We can use collective decision platforms such as Ethelo, together with panels of evaluators, to create standardized benchmark tests which can be used to train or test AIs on a series of ethical, epistemological and ontological statements and scenarios. Participants with relevant expertise and experience would collectively evaluate benchmark statements across a variety of criteria. That evaluation information is stored as metadata corresponding to each statement.

Assessments of participant expertise and experience can be determined through official accreditations, or socially, by having participants assign trust scores to candidates according to various criteria. The two approaches can also be combined, with accredited individuals having more weight in such evaluation processes. Such “liquid trust” processes will evolve and improve over time but essentially; they allow us to assign relatively reliable weights to the opinions and evaluations of panel participants across different domains of knowledge and evaluative criteria.

Panels containing random nominees or experts would be convened regularly based on queued questions, and panel participants would earn fees for their time. Along with technology costs, fees to participants will be the major cost of this process.

Benchmarking activities would operate similarly across different knowledge domains;  For epistemology, panels of experts would evaluate statements against a metric of “trustworthiness” or “truth”. This would include: both historical and scientific statements.

• For logic, we can evaluate statements like LSAT test-answers, logic texts, or even academic philosophy papers. It would be simply a matter of associating evaluative metadata to an underlying statement. We would evaluate reason- conclusion relationships where arguments are weighted in terms of their trustworthiness and impact on the conclusion for or against.

• For ethics, panels would evaluate statements against a metric of “the right,” perhaps across different criteria such as legal right, moral right, ecological right, etc. This will give AIs the ability to have normative knowledge - of “should” and “should not”. Such ethical metadata is the absolute prerequisite for giving AIs any tools for direct control over their environment.

• For public policy direction, democratic panels can give AI direction on relevant values, interests and interpretation, enabling it to apply and reconcile competing priorities within a larger policy framework. It can know, intuitively, that buildings should have fire escapes and wheelchair access. The new form of democracy we need, edemocracy, will act as the conscience of our ubiquitous AI servants and overlords.

We would, in essence, be building a body of “common law” precedents that would act as a highly nuanced version of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

By training AIs with statement-evaluation pairs as reference guideposts, an AI will be able to use language models to interpolate the truthfulness or morality of a statement it has never heard before. And the greater the size and quality of our deliberative data sets,  the better AI will be at taking direction.

Such guideposts would be more simply a database of individual feedback according to different criteria. It would be aggregated according to an “objective function” that would allow the determination of a “consensus” which would act as the guidepost. Traditional democratic methods would see a majority vote on a statement, but technologies such as Ethelo - able to generate and evaluate millions of scenarios based on collective feedback - would be much more powerful. We can define search functions that correspond to more sophisticated notions of “agreement.” We can for example apply a Rawlsian function, which seeks a scenario that will maximize the lowest level of support. Or we seek statements with low variance and high average support, such as Ethelo’s consensus score. And moreover, we can develop these objective functions according to a collective process also, so that the very definition of democracy is democratic.

The interconnectedness of language models and the increasing power of AIs will enable much interpolation and extrapolation on even a basic dataset. It would not be necessary to undertake a large number of evaluations before the metadata created would start acting as a guide rail. AIs have proven themselves fabulous at filling in the blanks.

We can even rank the quality of the guardrails; we can track the number of evaluators, their trustworthiness, their diversity, the level of deliberation, relevant changes since the statement was tested, etc. so that along with every metadata guardrail, there is a further level of metadata that can also be available. This can be used to bridge the gap between inconsistencies.

We can also create feedback loops using ongoing processes of consultation and evaluation. If an AI is faced with a scenario where it has conflict directions, or there is a level of uncertainty, it could queue queries for evaluation, with the most important questions rising to the top. The panels would be constantly working, providing direction, refreshing statements, deepening the granularity of analysis. Larger panels - on the level of referendums - would be used for deeper principles - such as the interpretation of human rights codes, or the amendment of the codes themselves.

AI that use such metadata could be “certified” to be truthful, moral, logical etc. Such datasets will be valuable, and we charge for access to the metadata. As some observers of the AI industry have said, as access to AI machines becomes increasingly commodified, it will be the unique datasets, rather than the machines themselves, that will be most valuable.

The AI should be able to predict when it is particularly uncertain about the truthfulness, morality etc of a statement. It can feed the most important and opaque statements to on-demand panels, and we can have a turn-around time of a few hours or even minutes before Ethelo can start to provide metadata guardrails.

Governments and communities will need to be proactive in creating systems for productive deployment of AI. A simple, but powerful policy goal would be for it to be illegal to operate an AI not certified as having met wise benchmarks and internalized governance guardrails.

Republished from Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2018

The 2017 World Values Survey documented a worrying shift in attitudes toward democracy. While in the 1930s and ’40s about three-quarters of Americans said it was essential to live in a democracy, less than one-third of Millennials believe this today. In 1964, 76 percent of Americans had faith in the government to do what is right “always or most” of the time. In 2015, that figure fell to only 19 percent.

The decline of faith in democracies parallels another trend: a 15 year decline in the global spread of democracies is the first significant reversal in this measure of engagement with democracy since the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

All told, it’s clear there is a growing crisis of faith in our democratic institutions and their seemingly limited capacity to address society’s social and environmental challenges. However, the maturing field of “eDemocracy,” once seen as a fringe endeavor, is revealing its depth and potential to address this crisis. eDemocracy (also known as digital democracy or Internet democracy) uses 21st-century information and communications technology to extend community engagement, expand suffrage and citizen agency, create real time decision making, rapidly aggregate opinion data, and pave the way for a shift from representative to more direct forms of democracy.

This emerging movement holds many opportunities for impact investment to support a renaissance in political participation. eDemocracy has the potential to “refresh” and deepen democratic practices and systems of governance. Although we see five major challenges to overcome before an Internet-based, democratic system can take root, we have identified some promising solutions. We also propose an “ecosystem approach” (by which we mean holistically supporting a variety of related yet diverse investments) for impact investors to deploy capital at a systems change level to optimize multiple returns for shareholder and stakeholder alike.

The Opportunity

The world’s current democratic institutions came into being about the same time as the telegram. But while Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has evolved, our systems of governance have not.

We believe new forms of government decisionmaking processes will play a critical role in addressing our world’s many challenges. While the enormous reach and computational capacity of the Internet and the development of global-spanning social networks spur visions of a better democracy, these new forms of governance remain largely aspirational.

Five main challenges to eDemocracy remain. Here, we outline each challenge, as well as recent developments that suggest that integrating eDemocracy with impact investing and innovative public policy may be the best method for overcoming many if not all of them.

There is one caveat for the impact investor: No single organization or initiative—either public or private—has solutions to all five challenges. In fact, few touch on more than two. Therefore, we must view eDemocracy through the lens of an ecosystem that will, in time, integrate solutions across each of the following challenge areas. In the absence of a central organizing body or defined market demand, impact investors must deploy capital in a manner that best supports this integration.

The effort to redesign democracy is a high-risk investment. However, the rewards to communities, societies, and our world may be exponential, offering a compelling impact investment opportunity.

Five Challenges for eDemocracy

1. Participation

One of the big promises of eDemocracy is universal, real-time participation in political process. Currently, only 55 percent of the eligible voting population in the United States participates in elections held every 4 years. By comparison, more Americans (58 percent) use Facebook on a daily basis. Imagine if democracy was as easy and fun to engage with as the world’s leading social network?

Martin Luther KING Jr. leads a group of marchers from Selma to Montgomery to fight for black suffrage, 1965. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos)

However, Facebook is not universal and neither is Internet access. In the United States, 84 percent of households have computers, and about three-quarters of US adults (77 percent) say they own a smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011. More than 92 percent of Millennials own a smartphone. Globally, the number of Internet users has increased from 738 million in 2000 to 3.8 billion in 2017. More than half of the world now uses the Internet.

The trend is clear. Driven by the commercial efforts of companies like Facebook and Google, as well as the social missions of NGOs such as Geeks Without Frontiers, the time of universal access for all will be upon us in a matter of years. If current trends continue, we will approach 100 percent Internet access by 2035. However, there are two important issues we must address before this access is democratic:

• Equality of access: A major reason people do not use the Internet—even when they have access—is cost. If political participation is a right, and the Internet is required to participate, it follows that Internet access for that purpose should also be a right. The movement for net neutrality, which is currently under threat by the Trump administration, holds that all data on the Internet should be subject to the same rate structure irrespective of user, type of content, or device. However, given income disparities, sameness of price is not equality of access. Increasingly, society is seeing the “right to Internet access” or “freedom to connect” as a right on par with the right to shelter or free speech. In June 2016, the UN Human Rights Council passed Article 19, a nonbinding resolution that condemns intentional government disruption of Internet access. Some of the organizations leading this rights-based effort for Internet access include the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Access Now, Internet Society, Open Media (Canada), and Article 19 (UK). Supporter donations also fund all of these organizations.

• Right of participation: 55 percent of eligible voters in the United States voted in the last election—lower than any other democratic country. But this percentage conceals a more concerning statistic: Approximately one third of all adults in the United States are not legally eligible to participate in the political system. This includes immigrants, temporary workers, and residents of US territories, as well as prisoners and convicted felons—the vast majority of whom are black and brown. While not a technology issue, the extension of suffrage to all adults is one of the fundamental principles of eDemocracy, and organizations involved in this effort are rightly viewed as part of the eDemocracy movement. Some of the organizations leading the effort for universal suffrage include the ACLU, Brennan Centre, League of Women Voters, Project Vote, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the Election Protection Coalition, and the National Commission on Voting Rights. Supporter donations also fund all of these organizations.

2. Validation

After the spectacle of the electoral process in Florida, the American Dialect Society declared “chad” was the word of the year in 2000, due to the intense debate regarding whether half-punched holes on ballots constituted “valid” votes. This electoral experience was a pointed reminder of how much our democracy relies on the technology of vote counting. And these concerns will not go away.

In July 2017, hackers at the DefCon conference took less than two hours to break into 30 different election machines. In September 2017, the US Department of Homeland Security informed 21 states that their voting systems had been the subject of hacking attacks, possibly connected to Russian efforts to subvert our nation’s election on behalf of the current president. Voting machines are secure only when they do not connect to the Internet; anything connected to the Internet is a target for hacking.

Voters at the polling station in Wyoming Indian High School’s Tech Center in Ethete, Wyoming. (Photo by Lindsay D’Addato)

However, in this context, validation is not merely about developing a hack-proof voting machine. An eDemocracy must match or improve on a whole range of protections our current voting system has evolved over the centuries, including:

• Identify verification

• Data security

• Vote privacy

• Duress protection

• Auditability

There is broad consensus among experts that online voting processes—at this stage of their development at least—simply cannot replace our current electoral system.

However, solutions to these challenges are beginning to emerge.

The private market will likely provide the solution to identity verification, as an outcome of the demand for device security and verifiable payment transactions in the commercial sector. Most likely it will be an interlocking constellation of solutions, including fingerprint sensors, face recognition, PINs, and physical artifacts. Once a winning standard has emerged in this sector, it will be easy to integrate into eDemocracy.

Data security, vote privacy, and count auditability are tougher nuts to crack. However, in the last four to five years, a new standard for online data security and auditability has emerged in the form of the blockchain, a decentralized and almost unhackable ledger system. The technology that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has been applied to many areas that require secure, decentralized data storage. Developers are already exploring impact implications of blockchain, as well as creating blockchain-based voting systems and ways to ensure the privacy of this data while respecting blockchain’s requirement for transparency.

Validation challenges remain. For example, technology cannot yet match the physical privacy of the ballot box in preventing coercion, bribery, and vote-selling.

Here are the leaders in eDemocracy validation:​

• Votem is a mobile voting system that supports both voter registration and voting using end-to-end blockchain-based encryption. It has a fully working product and has conducted several commercial engagements, including the selection of inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, which captured nearly 2 million votes. Votem is funded through equity investment.

• Votewatcher is a voting system that uses paper-based ballots with a QR code that the blockchain system scans and stores. It has a working product and has conducted several engagements using its technology, including two Libertarian Conventions. In 2015, Votewatcher was acquired by Global Arena Holdings, a publicly listed company and the owner of Global Election Services, which coordinates labor union elections across the United States and Canada.

• The blockchain voting space is growing quickly; we discovered more than a dozen earlier-stage efforts in researching this article. Some to watch are: Democracy.Earth (a graduate of Y Combinator), Horizon State (which just raised $1.4m through an Initial Coin Offering), Boule (which conducted a pilot vote on Scottish Independence), Polys (a subsidiary of Kaspersky), and Voatz (which recently partnered with online election company ClearBallot).

3. Delegation

Democracy has many forms. In essence, according to philosopher John Rawls, it means that each person has an equal seat at the table when it comes to negotiating a social contract. This level of participation is the ideal of direct democracy. However, the practical limits of participating in every conversation of public significance means that voters delegate their democratic power to representatives. This act of delegation marks a dividing line between “direct democracy” and representative democracy.

The weakness of representative democracy lies in the disconnection between voter and representative, infrequent elections, high voter-to-representative ratios, and the limited choices of a two- or three-party system. Moreover, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive branch of government makes democracy vulnerable to the lobby industry. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that our electoral system supports a market trade of money for influence. Therefore, reducing our democratic system’s reliance on current models of representation may in fact be one of the great opportunities of eDemocracy.

One solution is to decentralize power. Some advocate for a full direct democracy that eliminates delegation and calls on every person to participate in every decision. This creates its own set of problems, including the time and expertise it would require of everyone. However, there are hybrid proposals (known as “delegative democracy” or more commonly, “liquid democracy”), which enable people to delegate their influence to trusted representatives on an issue-by-issue basis, while preserving their ability to participate directly on other issues.

(Image courtesy of Direktdemokraterna, formerly Aktiv Demokrati)

In current democracies, representatives have broad jurisdiction restricted only by the constitutional limits on the power and term of their office. In a liquid democracy system, a voter may select many representatives, each with issue-specific knowledge and a jurisdiction limited to those issues. Moreover, the delegation is revocable at any point in time; it is not bound by a term.

Liquid democracy would require a highly sophisticated technological infrastructure. It would, however, be more effective at accessing the “wisdom of crowds” by providing people with a broader range of representation choices, backed by data and background information.

Here are the notable efforts in the area of liquid democracy:

• LiquidFeedback is an open source implementation of liquid democracy created for policy development by political parties and led by the nonprofit Public Software Group. Various parties at a local and national level—including the German, Austrian, and Italian Pirate Parties, and the Italian Movement Five Star—have adopted it. It is supported by donations, and its founders also provide consulting services through partner organizations.

• Adhocracy is an open source implementation of liquid democracy for decisionmaking processes, primarily for civil participation projects, but also by political parties and the German Federal Parliament. The Liquid Democracy eV society, which is funded by donations and earns revenue by providing consulting services, leads it.

• Other notable approaches to liquid democracy are Democracy Earth, which enables delegative voting on the blockchain, and Ethelo, which combines delegative voting with multi-scenario aggregation.

4. Deliberation

Traditional processes are single channel—one person can speak at a time. This is workable for small group communication, but the number of potential conversations grows exponentially with the number of participants. If there is only one microphone—a traditional town hall or assembly meeting, for example—things quickly become unmanageable due to the bottleneck in communication. This is one of the greatest challenges to group decisionmaking.

Information technology and social media provide multi-channel communication, but the power of those solutions has, in itself, created other challenges. We are now grappling with the impacts of “siloization” and the spread of fake news through social media.

For a democracy to function effectively, it is not enough to have communication—even multi-channel communication. We need deliberation. There must be exposure to and exchange of different ideas—reasoned debate and argument. What distinguished Greek democracy from other forms of government was not merely voting, but also the oratory and rhetoric that preceded voting; this then served the purpose of informing and influencing citizens.

A woodcut of Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes.

The collective search for truth includes sharing, discussion, debate, acknowledgment, and—hopefully but not necessarily—agreement. However, while that search ends with the collective, it begins with the personal: individual access to research, learning, and reflection. To support the emergence of collective insight, the Internet must be an open and free space, without censorship or coercion. Privacy of communication, including accessible encryption, must be available. There must be ways to verify the accuracy of information and solutions to the problem of fake news.

The comment tools of social media platforms such as Facebook are not conducive to deliberative dialogue. However, in recent years there has been considerable innovation in supporting online debate-style communication. Here are two promising examples:

• Kialo is a deliberative discourse platform designed to present hundreds of supporting and opposing arguments in a dynamic argument tree. Launched in August of 2017, it has already attracted hundreds of debates and significant participation. Kialo earns revenue through sales to large enterprises and is funded through equity investment.

• Intelligence Squared US (IQ2US) hosts online videos of live debates on a variety of topics, and enables the audience and visitors to vote and post pro-con arguments. It has been hosting debates since 2006 that regularly attract tens of thousands of viewers. IQ2US is a nonprofit supported by donations, as well as ticket sales and memberships.

Efforts in this space are notable for the diversity of their approach. Other innovations include Debategraph (a graphical representation of hierarchical debates), Micgoat (which allows users to debate using video clips), Reddit/Hacker News (which enables highly nested conversations), Debate.org (a simple but popular pro-con approach), and Pol.is (which provides visualizations to show broadly supported statements). New machine learning approaches to summarizing comments will also make an impact in this space.

5. Aggregation

The final stage of decisionmaking is, of course, making a choice; our systems generally reduce this to measuring the support participants have for different alternatives. Problematically, the traditional process of reducing decisions to either-or choices loses the texture, interconnections of multiple variables, and range of potential outcomes associated with deeply rooted and complex problems.

Our current parliamentary procedures are not conducive to complex decision making. They allow us to evaluate only a small number of proposed outcomes at a time, usually just one or two. There are strict rules regarding how legislators may modify those proposals; factions within the larger group, who can control the modifications permitted to the proposals before they are voted on must generally support amendments.

This process results in outcomes that have majority support, but that substantial minorities may nevertheless oppose—sometimes quite adamantly. This gap in satisfaction levels across groups is the tyranny of the majority. The consequences are polarization, resistance, destabilization, and often, oppression—results very much at odds with the principles of democracy.

This occasional oppression is generally accepted as an unfortunate but inevitable outcome of democracy. However, it is not inevitable. The same principle that guarantees an equality of influence in democratic participation also argues for an equality of satisfaction with outcomes. It is only because of limits in our traditional processes that we see such unequal and polarizing outcomes. Majority tyranny is not the inevitable outcome of democracy; it is just the result of a pre-technological approach to the mathematics of opinion aggregation.

(Image courtesy of Ethelo)

It is no longer necessary to oversimplify complex problems as a limited set of alternatives. Rather, we may refactor them as a framework of simpler problems that we can evaluate discretely. Presenting such frameworks with Internet technology, it is possible for large groups of people to focus their collective intelligence and collaboratively evaluate vast numbers of potential outcomes. Algorithms can then identify those outcomes that receive similar amounts of support from all parties.

One the greatest contributions of information technology will be new ways of aggregating opinion data to liberate eDemocracy from the tyranny of the majority.

• Ethelo is an online collaboration platform that enables groups to solve complex, multifactor problems and identify decisions with broad support. Ethelo earns revenue by providing licenses to consulting firms and large organizations doing stakeholder engagements. Ethelo is funded through equity investments.

• 1000minds provides an online suite of tools and processes to help individuals, groups, and organizations make decisions based on multiple objectives or criteria. Established in New Zealand in 2003, they earn revenue by providing licensing and consulting services to organizations.

• Other notable efforts include Loomio and Democracy.os (which support alternative voting with blocks and abstentions); Decisiontree and D-Sight (which use multi criteria decisionmaking); and Opavote, Modern Ballots, and Condorcet.vote (which use ranked choice voting).

The Unknown Variables

A sixth-seventh-eighth set of challenges is sure to emerge, perhaps replacing other challenges we resolve. The history of technology shows it is often very difficult to see problems until someone from left field proposes a solution. And so we must maintain an open and flexible position as we explore and invest in the future of eDemocracy. Some of the technologies that may prove themselves important include:

• Artificial intelligence (AI): How can AI assist with supporting validation, deliberation and aggregation? Some see AI as an enemy of democracy (fears of big brother), but with the right approach it may be a liberator; what if each person were represented by an AI delegate that they personally train and that negotiates to advance their political interests in whatever system emerges?

• **Machine-mind interfaces: **Smartphones are currently the bleeding edge of our interface with the Internet and each other. But they are merely interfaces and clumsy ones at that. We may see new, far more intimate integrations through mind-machine interfaces.

Other eDemocracy Investment Criteria

Other considerations and criteria investors need to keep in mind include:

1. Inter-operability

None of the initiatives listed above have the whole solution. They are pieces of the picture, and we must build a fully integrated system based on that picture before we can truly upgrade our current democracy. Investors therefore should support and encourage strategies for integration with other technologies, perhaps through open source licensing and public application program interfaces that allow software platforms to talk to each other. At some point down the road, these various technologies will consolidate into a few front runners. Strategies for growth through acquisition of complementary technologies will be important.

2. Financial viability

The journey to the new democracy is a marathon, not a sprint. It may take 10 or 20 years or more before the various pieces come together into a package the public is willing to put its faith in. Tech innovators that survive till to that point must find ways to sustain themselves financially while they grow. This does not necessarily mean a commercial business model; nonprofit models have certainly shown a capacity for growth. Or perhaps a hybrid may emerge. New market tools for fundraising, such as crowdfunding and Initial Coin Offerings, may also play a role.

3. Market validation

A multitude of websites, apps, and academic papers are proposing technology-based solutions to the challenges of eDemocracy. To be successful, they will need to establish a customer base, a value proposition, and strategies for creating traction that will enable them to hone their tools. They will not be able to build a business solving the problem of democracy; there isn’t much of a market there at the moment. They will need to find a corollary application in an adjacent market, something close enough to democracy that the learnings will transfer. These could include education, public consultations, smart contracts, human resource management, and business analytics.

4. Factors of success

In addition to the above, the traditional factors of success that the investment market is so good at identifying will be relevant here as well. Do they have a good team? Do they have unique technology and role in the ecosystem? Do they have a competitive advantage and means to defend it?

Conclusion

We have sketched a framework for how the impact investment community—through execution of a coordinated strategy for capital allocation that draws on everything from philanthropic to market-rate capital in a “total portfolio approach”—may plant and nurture the seeds for a fundamental re-engineering of our democratic system. It is long-term and carries various levels of risk, but it entails a high-reward strategy.

Consider the possibilities: If such a system proved significantly more effective than current models of government, given the global integration of the Internet, it would not take long to sweep away and out-compete other forms of government. One may envision the emergence of a new global smart network that connects every person on the planet to a new system of democratic government. Just as the Internet will blur the borders between traditional nations, these efforts will redefine the traditional boundary between “public” and “private” sectors. Public policy development will be as responsive and dynamic as the markets they are called upon to regulate and monitor. Such a system would potentially mark the emergence of an integrated human identity, a collective human voice.

Think of the problems eDemocracy could address. Climate change, economic inequality, military conflict, population growth: each of these are failures of public policy and international relations. A global, citizen-based system of governance based in democratic principles could prove to be technology’s greatest innovation and most profound benefit.