The Power Shift: Democracy in the age of AI

Conversations about the current moment of democratic fragility can end up creating a circular firing squad.

When democratic institutions are under strain, blame is easy.

‘Politicians must fix it.’ ‘The media must do better.’

But in reality, the forces reshaping democracy are much bigger than any one group.

Which means when it comes to navigating the current moment of democratic fragility there’s an important role for public sector leaders.

It's part of the job not to step too far into the political arena but they are not immune from the challenges and responsibilities facing many politicians when it comes to public trust. The institutions of democracy are subject to the same forces that are challenging political leaders and other institutions.

One of those forces is the result of structural changes in the information environment. People are consuming far more news via social media, leaving traditional (or 'legacy' media) struggling for relevance.

This shift has implications for how power is built, maintained and exercised in society.

When we review history we tend to absorb shifts in cultural and social norms driven by technology as if they happened quickly. The printing press may have enabled mass literacy but the scientific revolution only arrived two hundred years later. Radio was a 19th century invention that enabled mass communication but its political consequences didn’t really arrive until the mid-20th Century.

We also often assume that the nature of the shift was self-evident whilst it was happening. In reality big social changes tend to occur bit by bit over months and years until eventually we arrive at collective recognition of how much our world has changed.

We are still living through a technological leap of this kind of magnitude.

Enabled by the internet, and to a lesser degree the smartphone, the rise of digital information environments represents a re-defining moment in how humans relate to each other, in particular with regards to the creation, consumption and digestion of the information that informs belief and opinion.

We all know newspapers are dying out (UK sales have dropped from 20million a day to 2 million a day in the last two decades ) but the number of people watching television news is also falling year on year. Pew Center research shows almost twice as many US adults prefer digital devices for news consumption than TV.

Viewer numbers are one way to look at this but time spent on digital platforms comfortably surpasses traditional media sources with two-thirds of time spent on media consumption expected to be digital by 2026.

This epochal shift is not over. Artificial intelligence technology will write another chapter in the story.

There is inevitably a lag in which the old norms of communication slowly fail to deliver expected outcomes whilst those who innovate claim first-mover advantages.

The uncertainty of the present can make us crave the past - that’s why nostalgia can be such a powerful force. We need to look to the future, accept that there’s no going back and lean into what’s next.

This will involve more than just acknowledging the ways in which the world has changed, it will mean accepting them and acting upon them.

Re-thinking approaches to communication and letting go of old concepts of power and influence will be important but so too will adopting different behavioural norms. Striving to create environments where the government workforce and the citizens it serves can cooperate as equals, building common ground and allowing space for things to be complicated without being divisive.

The subsequent two articles in this series will set out how leaders can do this in ways which are consistent with the logic of modern digital information environments and explore how to approach the future of artificial intelligence so that it protects rather than threatens democracy.

Not everything happening today is new. Governments have rarely been widely trusted. They have always had an evolving relationship with their citizens and delivering public services as efficiently and effectively as possible will always be the most important yardstick by which they are judged.

What is new are the norms of citizen behaviour and expectation. Our world is simultaneously more attuned to the psychology of the human experience whilst often cultivating public discourse which harms collective well-being. Many commercial goods and services are available to consumers within a couple of clicks or swipes, they increasingly expect the same from their government.

Power is on the move at all levels of society, gravitating towards those who work with the grain of the modern condition and often captured by those who manipulate it. All of us must react.