Tech and Politics

Introduction - Defining digital media - Characteristics of digital media - Digitization and Digitalization - Lowered information costs - Interactivity - Networks - A (very) brief history of digital media - Cultures - Housekeeping - Coda
Script to episode with references and further readings: http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/intro.html

Website for podcast with episode scripts, references, and further readings:
https://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/

In this episode, we focus on three further contact areas between AI and democracy at different analytical levels:At the group level, AI impacts equality of rights among different groups of people in society.At the institutional level, AI impacts the perception of elections as a fair and open mechanism for channeling and managing political conflict.At the systems level, AI impacts competition between democratic and autocratic systems of government.
Skript: http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/ai.html#artificial-intelligence-and-equality

One tenet of democracy is that governments should be chosen by those they will serve. Such self-rule is a normative idea about legitimizing the temporal power of rulers over the ruled and a practical idea that distributed decision making is superior to other more centralized forms of decision making or rule by experts. AI impacts both the ability of people to achieve self-rule and the perceived superiority of distributed decision making over expert rule in complex social systems, highlighting potential limits to self-rule in several ways.
Skript: http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/ai.html#artificial-intelligence-and-self-rule

The successful application of artificial intelligence depends on a set of preconditions. Some are obvious. For example, to be successful AI needs to be able to access some digital representation of its environment, either through sensors mapping the world or through the input of existing data. Where these representations are difficult to come by or data are scarce, as in many areas of politics, AI will not be successful. Other preconditions are not so obvious. For example, for AI to produce helpful results, the underlying connections between inputs and outputs must be stable over time. This points to two problems: unobserved temporal shifts between variables and the dangers of relying on purely correlative evidence without support of causal models.More important still, especially with respect to democracy, is that normatively speaking the past must provide a useful template for the future. Change is a crucial feature of societies, especially the extension of rights and the participation of previously excluded groups. Over time, many societies strive to decrease discrimination and increase equality. In fact, many policies are consciously designed to break with past patterns of discrimination. AI-based predictions and classifications based on past patterns risk replicating systemic inequalities and even structural discrimination.Few problems in politics and in democracy more broadly share these characteristics. This limits the application of AI in society and, accordingly, its impact on democracy.
Skript: http://digitalmedia.andreasjungherr.de/ai.html#conditions-for-the-successful-application-of-artificial-intelligence