Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI - Schneier on Security

Precisely because technology is now moving so fast, and parliaments and dictators alike are overwhelmed by data they cannot process quickly enough, present-day politicians are thinking on a far smaller scale than their predecessors a century ago. Consequently, in the early twenty-first century politics is bereft of grand visions. Government has bec

I will argue that the constraints on governance in online spaces have contributed to the peril of democratic politics in general. It is not enough to merely defend existing governmental institutions; healthy democracy depends on enabling creative new forms of self-governance, especially on networks.

More central to the heart of governmental responsibility in democracies, however, is the digitization of public services.

Technology is ultimately political because technology is a form of power. And perhaps the single overriding characteristic of the coming wave is that it will democratize access to power. As we saw in part 2, it will enable people to do things in the real world. I think of it like this: just as the costs of processing and broadcasting information pl

The megapolitical logic of cyberspace suggests that central command-and-control systems that currently dominate the world’s large-scale infrastructure will have to be replaced by multicentric models of security with distributed capabilities so they cannot be easily captured or blocked by a computer virus.