Madeleine Daepp

Right.

I don't know, I would say...

Yeah.

Yeah. I think Westphalian taxonomy is the wrong thing for this kind of fight, right? Westphalian taxonomy, meaning like the nation state.

But isn't that -- I mean, that's in part because other nations weren't inspecting their borders. If there were some that were doing a really good job, then you could coordinate just...

Of a digital, you know, these are the Facebook accounts that get blue checks in this, right?

Whose job is it to say, you know, when we're online, privacy is important, but it's important to me that this person be real, that they be located in the place that they say that they're located, and that they be unique. Right. Whose job is it to make that happen?

Yeah.

It creates a nexus of power with no check and balance.

Can I take this to algorithms?

Something that we've been talking a lot about is participatory inputs to algorithms, right? You can think about an algorithm like a lot of contemporary platform algorithms, as a nexus of power without checks and balances.

But something that I have been delighted by as I get into this work has been the use of MyGoPen and TFC in the algorithm. Right. That if they produce a fact check, we don't know exactly...

And so I'm curious just for your thoughts on kind of this, like how else we can incorporate lots of forms of contributions into algorithms and whether this provides us a mechanism for decentralizing some of that algorithmic power.

Interesting.

So you're moving the algorithms to the edge.

Wild.

Yeah. Okay. You'd have to require the platform, right? There's been some new legal work around requiring the platforms to create both just uncurated timeline in addition to the curated timeline, right? Where it would just be by time. And of course, the problem is it's terrible.

Yeah. Okay, well, that aside, it also is not an effective source of information.

But it's a great input to an edge algorithm.

If you had a magic wand and you could do anything you wanted in this space.

Really?

Can you say more?

Do you want to ask a question, Robert?

I think in one of the things that I read, you used an analogy of diversity. I think the gist was that maybe the attorneys being like the AI and...

When you say participation... I think about participation, given my background, as two things, or in two ways. Number one, is this kind of like almost like a moral value that for something to be participatory means for it to be inclusive or to bring...

Exactly, yes. And then the other thing that I think about, and I do not think of these, they're under the same English word in my brain, but I don't think of them as the same thing, is the sort of collective intelligence that the more information you bring in, the better the outcomes are.

Is that, when you say participation, are you thinking, I guess, inclusion and diversity of thought, or are there other things?

Right.

And what's the progress-safety edge?

That's a strong statement.

Is there also a naive, positive framing of the progress-safety edge? One thing that I've heard in several cases, the research, as I understand it, is quite mixed on this, but sometimes aligned AI or AI with good guardrails is actually a lot better to use, a lot more usable for the end user than AI without guardrails.

Interesting. We've talked about co-creation as a piece of participation and inclusion as a piece of participation. But I'm still struggling with the piece of, like when you have the broad participation, for example, in a democracy, you can still end up with really bad outcomes for marginalized and minoritized groups, right?

And that's where you get things like bills of rights, human rights frameworks, or equity orientation that says okay, like 90% of people think that this is okay, but for this 10% chunk, it's really, really important. And so we're not going to accept it, right? And so I'm curious how you, I mean, this is just like the majority problem, right?

So reducing the latency of democracy is about changing the pace at which information turns into action, right?

Okay. And then changing the bitrate is about...

Okay.

Okay, can I ask you just about the latency piece? Another book that's on my to-read list is Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka, and she writes about how, at least in the States, we have a sort of like, we almost front-load democracy. We make these grand strategic approaches and then just assume implementation will be taken care of. And it sounds like your framing and approach is really

about constant iteration and implementation.

Is what you're referring to the Join platform?

And when you do the collective intelligence project work using Polis, VTaiwan, Remesh, do people have to verify using their SMS?

Interesting. Cool. As an urban planner, I love participatory budgeting and I love strategies that enable people to have more of a voice in their locality, more of a voice in the lines of governance that affect them most. Really deeply interesting. Are there other places that you think are operating on this level?

One more question and then I'll hand it over to you. Or to you, Vickie, the talent. If you have bug bounties, you have all of these open source systems, all of this is made better when residents can co-produce this tooling. But in order for that to be possible, you need your students to take computer science, right?

Yeah, and maybe with AI, the barrier to entry is lower. But certainly in my own experience, I found that when you bring in students from diverse places around the world, students, computer scientists with all kinds of different backgrounds, what you get is tooling and approaches that are more usable to the communities that they come from frequently, right?

And so I'm curious, if you think about building the capacity of people here to fully participate in this work, how you think about that?

Fascinating. Thank you, Robert. Vickie, do you have questions?

Is there anything else we should be asking that we haven't asked?

As just a casual example, I don't know where that comes from. [laughter]

Can I give you a different metaphor? It's not fully formed yet, but it's something that comes up for me over and over when I think about this space, which is in the climate change and ecology literature, the idea of ecosystem services, which is where you look at all of the value that's created when a farmer adds a hedgerow for bee biodiversity or something like this.

Various researchers have gone and shown that what's called ecosystem services, classically not considered on balance sheets or budgets, it's not funded, it's not resourced, but it creates billions of dollars of value. And so there's been a real move to make that measurable, to show its value and then to both fund it but also to tax for it. So I'm curious if that's a useful metaphor.

Exactly.