Return-Path: Delivered-To: alvarochf@traceseis.com Received: from cs510.bluehost.com by cs510.bluehost.com with LMTP id +Ng6MEbZImruRQ8AWiBQxw (envelope-from ) for ; Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:12:22 -0600 Return-path: Envelope-to: alvarochf@traceseis.com Delivery-date: Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:12:22 -0600 Received: from v541.v5375b7fa.use4.send.mailgun.net ([159.112.244.41]:59670) by cs510.bluehost.com with esmtps (TLS1.2) tls TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 (Exim 4.99.2) (envelope-from ) id 1wVVHZ-00000000IGG-3x7G for alvarochf@traceseis.com; Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:12:22 -0600 DKIM-Signature: a=rsa-sha256; v=1; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mg-d1.substack.com; q=dns/txt; s=k1; t=1780668725; x=1780675925; h=List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe: List-Post: List-Id: List-Archive: List-Owner: Reply-To: In-Reply-To: References: Sender: Sender: Date: Message-Id: To: To: From: From: Subject: Subject: Content-Type: Mime-Version; bh=nF23CWmVZvKzo/3CcAB6KLKgk2/ACH/fmY39JQcxZdk=; b=pBLbBKpwx6CHq+Fhw/3ThAYmybMyH52lYWe2oVIyd0xL3VaWJJY2ULgqqck0zPmb/j3WkUfywh0HMnmD37Fs/9lMz4Quo0qCltAgMmobFdPRki3KikY2TGNzcQMpQe3RYsw7MjUdwjTnyPRyJgokU2tEIp631hwVv79V0K9xOfE= X-Mailgun-Sid: WyJiYTg1MiIsImFsdmFyb2NoZkB0cmFjZXNlaXMuY29tIiwiMzliMDhjNiJd Received: by 104d0a364a3a3ba40910b5408976bedbfb8ea08f5e7033680d93f49916fe9b64 with HTTP id 6a22d93400bf4803dc0fe360; Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:12:03 GMT X-Mailgun-Sending-Ip: 159.112.244.41 X-Mailgun-Batch-Id: 6a22d9339674ff8ea2808bb6 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="e1399d95704fee99c58e3daf69fa4dc665e8d6306676625528b42647aa14" Subject: Politics Cannot be Simulated From: Cosmos Institute To: alvarochf@traceseis.com X-Mailgun-Tag: post X-Mailgun-Track-Clicks: false Message-Id: <20260605140350.3.5d44f652c9c0fd5d@mg-d1.substack.com> Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2026 14:03:50 +0000 Feedback-Id: post-200734836:cat-post:pub-2225794:substack Sender: Cosmos Institute References: In-Reply-To: Reply-To: Cosmos Institute List-Owner: List-Url: List-Archive: List-Id: List-Post: List-Unsubscribe: List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click X-Mailgun-Variables: {"category": "post", "email_generated_at": "1780668723287", "is_freemail": "true", "post_audience": "everyone", "post_id": "200734836", "post_type": "newsletter", "pub_community_enabled": "true", "publication_id": "2225794", "subdomain": "cosmosinstitute", "user_id": "347258985"} X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 X-Spam-Score: -7 X-Spam-Bar: / X-Spam-Flag: NO --e1399d95704fee99c58e3daf69fa4dc665e8d6306676625528b42647aa14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable View this post on the web at https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/politics-c= annot-be-simulated Civic life is the practice of taking responsibility with others for the sha= red conditions of common existence. Today, many of us hold a view of politi= cs that is a long way from this ideal. We equate civic life with voting for= representatives who make decisions on our behalf or engaging in limited fo= rms of consultation when the opportunity arises. Modern politics is a syste= m for making decisions rather than citizens. Our predicament is partly a function of scale. The polities of the ancient = world, though deeply limited in many respects, were small enough that those= who held the right to engage in collective decision-making knew their peer= s and could formulate laws that would directly affect them. In gargantuan m= odern states, this kind of engagement is a practical impossibility. Representative democracy exists, in part, to free us from the demands that = direct self-rule would otherwise make of us. Classical proponents like Edmu= nd Burke and James Madison argued that representation also improves the qua= lity of governance by passing public preferences through a deliberative bod= y capable of refining them and attending to the long term good. On Madison=E2=80=99s account in Federalist 10, the legislature exists =E2= =80=9Cto refine and enlarge the public views=E2=80=9D by passing them throu= gh =E2=80=9Ca chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the tr= ue interest of their country.=E2=80=9D In Federalist 51, he argues that =E2= =80=9Cambition must be made to counteract ambition,=E2=80=9D that political= structures should compensate for the imperfection of those who govern and = those who are governed. In other words, representative democracy can produc= e stable public decisions without requiring citizens to be highly formed ci= vic actors. Of two modes of civic life, formation and aggregation, the latter is taken = to be the primary role of an advanced democracy. As political systems strai= n under the complexity of the modern world, AI threatens to remake institut= ions like education, entertainment, economic systems, the media, and variou= s professions. Thinking machines do cheaply the things institutions were bu= ilt for (such as drafting legal contracts or writing and researching) and m= ake possible things they were not designed for (like one-on-one tutoring fo= r every student or autonomous agents that act on a person=E2=80=99s behalf)= =2E These twin pressures demand new kinds of institutions, especially political= institutions to help societies navigate the diffusion of AI into public an= d private life. Various kinds of =E2=80=9CAI for democracy=E2=80=9D project= s fit this account by appearing to remake democratic decision-making throug= h, for example, summarization techniques for lawmakers or fostering agreeme= nt on contentious issues. This assessment gets things backwards. AI represents, at least in the conte= xt of democracy, a small-c conservative turn that may entrench an aggregati= ve view of civic life at exactly the point at which new possibilities allow= us to better ask what civic life is and why it matters. The technology cou= ld prove to be less a centrifugal force pulling political institutions apar= t and more a centripetal force gluing a particular kind of institutional ar= rangement into place. A view that takes civic life to be about primarily producing better and mor= e legitimate decisions through preference aggregation has been dominant for= two centuries. The AI and democracy project takes that settlement and make= s it more efficient, capable, pervasive, and considerably harder to dislodg= e. It is the terminus of the Madisonian project, a sophisticated apparatus = for generating politically resonant outputs without bearing the cost of cit= izen formation. City on the hill The first recognizable instance of politics-as-formation was the Athenian p= olity, a self-governing political community that emerged on the peninsula o= f Attica in southern Greece around the late sixth century BCE. Across two a= nd a half thousand square kilometers, roughly the size of modern Luxembourg= , the Athenian polity was made up of the city proper, surrounding villages = and farmland, the silver mines country at Laurion in the south, and the por= t of Piraeus a few miles from the city. From urban core to rural hinterland, all citizens who met the criteria were= part of the same political whole. A farmer thirty miles from the city and = the craftsman in the agora belonged to the same community and could expect,= if they chose to make the journey, to vote in the same assembly. The polit= y was small enough that everyone within it was capable of representing ever= yone else. Roughly 250,000 to 300,000 residents fell under the authority of Athens in = the fourth century BCE. Of these, only adult male Athenians born of Athenia= n parents, say, about 30,000 men, were full citizens with political rights.= Factoring out wives, daughters, slaves, foreigners, the political communit= y was around ten to twelve per cent of the population. The Assembly or Ekklesia was a gathering of all citizens together as a sing= le body. It met about forty times a year on a hill called the Pnyx, a quart= er of a mile south-west of the Athenian agora. The body dealt with the thin= gs that today we would call =E2=80=9Chigh politics,=E2=80=9D such as whethe= r to go to war, whether to accept peace terms, what taxes to levy, what law= s to pass, or how much grain to import. It also included grislier episodes = like voting to slaughter the entire population of Mytilene and putting its = own generals to death after the battle of Arginusae. Another institution was the Council of Five Hundred, the Boule, which funct= ioned as a kind of executive committee for the Assembly. It set the agenda = and supervised the administration of the state. Its members were chosen by = raffle, with fifty citizens each year drawn at random from each of the poli= ty=E2=80=99s ten tribes. Most male Athenians spent a year of their adult li= fe as part of the executive government of their state. Together, these bodies meant that the participating citizen might attend th= e Assembly several times a year, serve a full year on the executive Council= , sit as juror in major trials, and hold one or more rotational offices. Fo= r those who could take part, institutions allowed citizens to live a partic= ular kind of political life. A handful of professional administrators could= have made decisions far more quickly, yet the Athenians chose to bind them= selves to more cumbersome arrangements because the essence of the system wa= s to produce citizens. Aristotle described this idea as hexis, a durable state of character cultiv= ated through repeated action and habituation. We become just by doing just = acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, and brave by doing brave acts. The= citizen is formed by undergoing the discipline of ruling and being ruled i= n turn. They grow by attending the Assembly, sitting on the Council, hearin= g cases in the courts, and being held to account for their decisions.=20 Aggregation vs. formation Civic life is taken to serve primarily one of two ends: Aggregating preferences. The process by which the preferences of citizens a= re gathered and weighed against one another to be converted into collective= decisions. The citizen is a source of opinions that the political system n= eeds in order to govern well. Forming citizens. The process by which citizens are made and remade. The ou= tput of democratic participation is the participant herself insofar as she = leaves with a capacity to be a better civic actor. Where the ancient model was mostly concerned with forming citizens, modern = democracies are for the most part sprawling systems for converting preferen= ces into governance. More participants produce more inputs to be aggregated= , so in principle there is no upper bound on the size of the political comm= unity to which the procedure can apply. Modern institutions can hoover up p= references from millions through regular elections, but only at an extremel= y low level of resolution. The basic claim of the aggregative family is that democracy is valuable bec= ause it generates good collective decisions, that the citizen is essentiall= y an information source that produces preferences or opinions to be subordi= nated to the greater whole. Democratic procedures (like voting, deliberatio= n, polling, or citizens=E2=80=99 assemblies) are all tools for processing t= hose inputs into legitimate outputs. Even within the aggregative tradition, some like John Stuart Mill argue tha= t representative democracy can make citizens as well as decisions. For Mill= , even occasional participation in public functions has a salutary effect o= n the citizen who takes part. =E2=80=9CHe is called upon,=E2=80=9D Mill wri= tes of the private citizen, =E2=80=9Cto weigh interests not his own; to be = guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private par= tialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for th= eir reason of existence the general good.=E2=80=9D Analyses of this type acknowledge that formation is a laudable goal and hop= e that representative institutions could supply some version of it through = juries, local office, and the modest acts of public engagement available to= a private citizen. In practice, however, the settlement does not bear out = these hopes. Over the century and a half since Mill=E2=80=99s reflections, = the aggregative purposes of the system have steadily eclipsed its formative= functions. Few of us would today say that the systems we live inside sharp= en our faculty of self-governance or fellow-feeling. Parallel to the aggregation tradition is the formation-first approach, best= characterized by Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels across America in th= e 1830s. Tocqueville believed that the habits of self-rule in the small thi= ngs prepared people to rule themselves in the great ones. The more citizens= tested their judgments in the company of others, the more resilient their = characters became. Democracy stood or fell on these everyday practices, for= it was only through the rehearsal of judgment in everyday life that citize= ns could learn the art of governing themselves. Tocqueville knew what happened when those habits were no longer present. In= the France he grew up in, centuries of monarchical centralization had draw= n the business of ordinary life away from local communities and into the ha= nds of the state, so that by the time the revolution spilled into the stree= ts, the citizens who were asked to govern themselves had long since lost th= e practice of doing so. The provincial assemblies that had once given ordinary people a say in thei= r own affairs had been largely abolished; the guilds and local associations= that had trained people in the small arts of collective decision-making ha= d been suppressed; and the aristocratic class that had once served, however= imperfectly, as a counterweight to central power had been reduced to a dec= orative caste with titles but no responsibilities. Tocqueville imagined how this kind of decay might unfold in a country that = had skipped its aristocratic adolescence. One danger was that citizens migh= t willingly hand over the work of self-government to a mild and far-seeing = administrative state. He described a =E2=80=9Ctutelary power=E2=80=9D that = =E2=80=9Cdoes not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, an= d stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a = flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shep= herd.=E2=80=9D Democratic deficit Representative democracy faces two distinct challenges within the aggregati= ve tradition. The first is a bandwidth problem, which reminds us that moder= n institutions can only collect citizens=E2=80=99 views in a heavily compre= ssed form - like a vote or poll - that fails to capture most of what each c= itizen actually thinks. The second is the deliberative problem. Here the ki= nd of refining and filtering Burke and Madison thought representative bodie= s were for has been overtaken by the volume of political business and the p= rofessionalization of representatives. The AI for democracy field is directed at the first problem. It concerns ca= pturing citizens=E2=80=99 views at higher fidelity and aggregating those in= puts at scale. The deliberative deficit barely features beyond the comparat= ively narrow work of synthesizing information so that officials can deliber= ate with better inputs. The formative concern, which is about what civic li= fe does to the citizens who take part in them, is not a significant part of= the project. A survey [ https://substack.com/redirect/95f0b83b-ead1-41e5-a39d-22b166476f= c5?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-HyoA ] by= Seth Lazar and Lorenzo Manuali connects the field=E2=80=99s work to four m= odes of usage: Summarization: Synthesizing information in a way that officials or citizens= can act more effectively. One developed example is the Recursive Public pr= oject, which gathered [ https://substack.com/redirect/0e4411c7-f0d5-4ff4-92= 87-7787eaf3b456?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6= eWS-HyoA ] public input on AI policy and used LLMs to summarize the resulti= ng discussions and group similar arguments into clusters in semantic space. Aggregation: Generating new statements that the model predicts will attract= broader support than any of the originals. The Generative Social Choice pr= oject, for example, took participants=E2=80=99 [ https://substack.com/redir= ect/2e6a6ea4-0231-4f12-b715-70841c4c3a74?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64= cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-HyoA ] views on contested issues and prompted = a model to propose a slate of statements that a majority of participants re= ported feeling =E2=80=9Cexcellently=E2=80=9D or =E2=80=9Cexceptionally=E2= =80=9D represented by. Representation: Predicting user preferences by standing in for her in a sim= ulated polity. See, for example, the Augmented Democracy project [ https://= substack.com/redirect/ac0b1999-c1b2-438e-a907-74469cf865ab?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFx= eXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-HyoA ], which seeks =E2=80= =9Cto create personalized AI representatives to augment their ability to pa= rticipate directly in many democratic decisions.=E2=80=9D Facilitation: Engaging participants in a structured conversation whereby th= e model plays the role of a discussion leader to keep conversations on topi= c, ask follow-up questions, draw reluctant participants into the exchange, = and produce summaries at intervals. See Rappler=E2=80=99s aiDialogue projec= t [ https://substack.com/redirect/0951f719-1a9a-4857-9c66-4d9f426d7787?j=3D= eyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-HyoA ]. All of the major labs have worked on projects that fall within these catego= ries, from Anthropic=E2=80=99s Collective Constitutional AI process designe= d to crowdsource [ https://substack.com/redirect/b4996ddf-5fb9-439d-870e-95= e76f689849?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-H= yoA ] Claude=E2=80=99s constitution to Google DeepMind=E2=80=99s Habermas M= achine [ https://substack.com/redirect/42f4ca70-578c-4dc4-9f50-e3e0e8aad736= ?j=3DeyJ1IjoiNXFxeXF4In0.h9dEDbGj64cTNudluPwbMYWklSu8UKGoFv6eWS-HyoA ] that= helps groups of individuals find consensus on political topics. These tools and others like them make it possible to aggregate preferences = more efficiently. They also provide the resulting decisions with a kind of = legitimacy that any modern polity needs in order to function. The decisions= that constitute political life must be made somehow, and a procedure that = draws as fully as possible on its citizens is by most reasonable measures a= n improvement on the status quo. Like the vast majority of AI and democracy projects, each of the examples d= escribed above are concerned with aggregation rather than formation. An acc= urate clustering of a thousand Americans=E2=80=99 opinions about a frontier= model=E2=80=99s content policy does not give anyone the experience of havi= ng governed themselves. A more efficient deliberative platform that drafts = consensus statements between strangers does not produce the habits of self-= rule that the Athenian Assembly or the New England town meeting cultivated = through consequential practice over the course of an ordinary life. The outputs look superficially similar in that citizens have played a role,= but they did so without the inward labor through which civic life makes ci= tizens. A citizen who has practiced forming and revising her own views in c= onversation with her peers is a better judge of political questions than so= meone whose preferences have been collected and aggregated by a model. Rath= er than asking us to trade decision quality for civic virtue, the formative= tradition suggests both are the joint product of the same practice. An obvious response is to ask whether AI might be designed to support a for= mative account of civic life. The temptation should be resisted. Formation = is constituted by the experience of being responsible for consequences alon= gside fellow citizens whose lives are bound up with yours. There is no AI s= ystem, however carefully designed, that can deliver that. While not straightforwardly citizen-making themselves, there are uses of AI= that could lower the cost of entry to formative practices. A tool that hel= ps a citizen convene like-minded peers does not help us grow, but it does m= ake the work of civic life easier to start. A system that translates a coun= cil planning document into something the resident affected by it can unders= tand does not produce a citizen capable of self-rule, but it may lower the = transaction cost of participation through which such a citizen might be mad= e. Formative years Tocqueville thought that juries were slower than judges and more likely to = err on questions of law. If the only purpose of the courtroom was to produc= e the right verdict, the jury would have been abolished long ago. =E2=80=9C= The jury teaches every man not to recoil before the responsibility of his o= wn actions,=E2=80=9D he wrote, =E2=80=9Cand impresses him with that manly c= onfidence without which political virtue cannot exist.=E2=80=9D Today, we think about governance as the process by which decisions are take= n on our behalf and implemented by specialists. This is in part a function = of the highly complex nature of the modern world, which depends on large-sc= ale coordination and deep technical specialization.=20 Even so, the decisions that constitute political life are taken at scales t= hat far exceed the ceiling of the Tocquevillian model. The areas that remai= n to citizens at the local level are administrative bodies operating downst= ream of decisions taken elsewhere rather than deliberative bodies that make= decisions and live with the results. AI systems may well make political institutions more legitimate, more effic= ient, and more responsive to our collective wants. On its own terms, this i= s a good outcome if it helps democracies make better decisions according to= the wishes of their people. But collecting and aggregating preferences is = not how we become more capable agents who can better take part in civic lif= e. Unsubscribe https://substack.com/redirect/2/eyJlIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly9ibG9nLmNvc21= vcy1pbnN0aXR1dGUub3JnL2FjdGlvbi9kaXNhYmxlX2VtYWlsP3Rva2VuPWV5SjFjMlZ5WDJsa0= lqb3pORGN5TlRnNU9EVXNJbkJ2YzNSZmFXUWlPakl3TURjek5EZ3pOaXdpYVdGMElqb3hOemd3T= mpZNE56SXpMQ0psZUhBaU9qRTRNVEl5TURRM01qTXNJbWx6Y3lJNkluQjFZaTB5TWpJMU56azBJ= aXdpYzNWaUlqb2laR2x6WVdKc1pWOWxiV0ZwYkNKOS5TS3cyT0dpd1FELVA5NGJIdk44bVN3aHB= 0Rk5SX1RESExvUklMUTJUb0ZjIiwicCI6MjAwNzM0ODM2LCJzIjoyMjI1Nzk0LCJmIjp0cnVlLC= J1IjozNDcyNTg5ODUsImlhdCI6MTc4MDY2ODcyMywiZXhwIjoyMDk2MjQ0NzIzLCJpc3MiOiJwd= WItMCIsInN1YiI6ImxpbmstcmVkaXJlY3QifQ.jlW-BBYu2j4e8T6HsnXSSw2QHGZx6P-YYeTGt= KdyNFc? --e1399d95704fee99c58e3daf69fa4dc665e8d6306676625528b42647aa14 Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable = Politics Cannot be Simulated3D""
There’s more to democracy than de= cision-making
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Politics Cannot be Simulated

There’= ;s more to democracy than decision-making

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Harry Law
 
 
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Idealized Greek Landscape with resting Shepherds, = Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841)

Civic life is the practice of taking responsibility with others for the sh= ared conditions of common existence. Today, many of us hold a view of polit= ics that is a long way from this ideal. We equate civic life with voting fo= r representatives who make decisions on our behalf or engaging in limited f= orms of consultation when the opportunity arises. Modern politics is a syst= em for making decisions rather than citizens.

Our predicame= nt is partly a function of scale. The polities of the ancient world, though= deeply limited in many respects, were small enough that those who held the= right to engage in collective decision-making knew their peers and could f= ormulate laws that would directly affect them. In gargantuan modern states,= this kind of engagement is a practical impossibility.

Repr= esentative democracy exists, in part, to free us from the demands that dire= ct self-rule would otherwise make of us. Classical proponents like Edmund B= urke and James Madison argued that representation also improves the quality= of governance by passing public preferences through a deliberative body ca= pable of refining them and attending to the long term good.

On Madison’s account in Federalist 10, the legislature exists “= ;to refine and enlarge the public views” by passing them through R= 20;a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true intere= st of their country.” In Federalist 51, he argues that “ambitio= n must be made to counteract ambition,” that political structures sho= uld compensate for the imperfection of those who govern and those who are g= overned. In other words, representative democracy can produce stable public= decisions without requiring citizens to be highly formed civic actors.

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Of two modes of civic life, formation and aggregation, the latter is taken to be the pr= imary role of an advanced democracy. As political systems strain under the = complexity of the modern world, AI threatens to remake institutions like ed= ucation, entertainment, economic systems, the media, and various profession= s. Thinking machines do cheaply the things institutions were built for (suc= h as drafting legal contracts or writing and researching) and make possible= things they were not designed for (like one-on-one tutoring for every stud= ent or autonomous agents that act on a person’s behalf).

These twin pressures demand new kinds of institutions, especiall= y political institutions to help societies navigate the diffusion of AI int= o public and private life. Various kinds of “AI for democracy” = projects fit this account by appearing to remake democratic decision-making= through, for example, summarization techniques for lawmakers or fostering = agreement on contentious issues.

This assessment gets thing= s backwards. AI represents, at least in the context of democracy, a small-c= conservative turn that may entrench an aggregative view of civic life at e= xactly the point at which new possibilities allow us to better ask what civ= ic life is and why it matters. The technology could prove to be less a cent= rifugal force pulling political institutions apart and more a centripetal f= orce gluing a particular kind of institutional arrangement into place.

<= p style=3D"margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-s= ize: 16px;">A view that takes civic life to be about primarily producing be= tter and more legitimate decisions through preference aggregation has been = dominant for two centuries. The AI and democracy project takes that settlem= ent and makes it more efficient, capable, pervasive, and considerably harde= r to dislodge. It is the terminus of the Madisonian project, a sophisticate= d apparatus for generating politically resonant outputs without bearing the= cost of citizen formation.

City on the= hill

The first recognizable instance of politics= -as-formation was the Athenian polity, a self-governing political community= that emerged on the peninsula of Attica in southern Greece around the late= sixth century BCE. Across two and a half thousand square kilometers, rough= ly the size of modern Luxembourg, the Athenian polity was made up of the ci= ty proper, surrounding villages and farmland, the silver mines country at L= aurion in the south, and the port of Piraeus a few miles from the city.

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From urban core to rural hinterland, all citizens who met the = criteria were part of the same political whole. A farmer thirty miles from = the city and the craftsman in the agora belonged to the same community and = could expect, if they chose to make the journey, to vote in the same assemb= ly. The polity was small enough that everyone within it was capable of repr= esenting everyone else.

Roughly 250,000 to 300,000 resident= s fell under the authority of Athens in the fourth century BCE. Of these, o= nly adult male Athenians born of Athenian parents, say, about 30,000 men, w= ere full citizens with political rights. Factoring out wives, daughters, sl= aves, foreigners, the political community was around ten to twelve per cent= of the population.

The Assembly or Ekkles= ia was a gathering of all citizens together as a single body. It= met about forty times a year on a hill called the Pnyx, a quarter of a mil= e south-west of the Athenian agora. The body dealt with the things that tod= ay we would call “high politics,” such as whether to go to war,= whether to accept peace terms, what taxes to levy, what laws to pass, or h= ow much grain to import. It also included grislier episodes like voting to = slaughter the entire population of Mytilene and putting its own generals to= death after the battle of Arginusae.

Another = institution was the Council of Five Hundred, the Boule, which functioned as a kind of executive committee for the Assembly. It s= et the agenda and supervised the administration of the state. Its members w= ere chosen by raffle, with fifty citizens each year drawn at random from ea= ch of the polity’s ten tribes. Most male Athenians spent a year of th= eir adult life as part of the executive government of their state.

Together, these bodies meant that the participating citizen = might attend the Assembly several times a year, serve a full year on the ex= ecutive Council, sit as juror in major trials, and hold one or more rotatio= nal offices. For those who could take part, institutions allowed citizens t= o live a particular kind of political life. A handful of professional admin= istrators could have made decisions far more quickly, yet the Athenians cho= se to bind themselves to more cumbersome arrangements because the essence o= f the system was to produce citizens.

Aristotle descr= ibed this idea as hexis, a durable state of character= cultivated through repeated action and habituation. We become just by doin= g just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, and brave by doing brave ac= ts. The citizen is formed by undergoing the discipline of ruling and being = ruled in turn. They grow by attending the Assembly, sitting on the Council,= hearing cases in the courts, and being held to account for their decisions= =2E

Aggregation vs. formation

Civic life is taken to serve primarily one of two en= ds:

  • Aggregating preferences. The p= rocess by which the preferences of citizens are gathered and weighed agains= t one another to be converted into collective decisions. The citizen is a s= ource of opinions that the political system needs in order to govern well.<= /span>

  • Fo= rming citizens. The process by which citizens are made and r= emade. The output of democratic participation is the participant herself in= sofar as she leaves with a capacity to be a better civic actor.

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Where the ancient model was mostly concerned with for= ming citizens, modern democracies are for the most part sprawling systems f= or converting preferences into governance. More participants produce more i= nputs to be aggregated, so in principle there is no upper bound on the size= of the political community to which the procedure can apply. Modern instit= utions can hoover up preferences from millions through regular elections, b= ut only at an extremely low level of resolution.

The basic = claim of the aggregative family is that democracy is valuable because it ge= nerates good collective decisions, that the citizen is essentially an infor= mation source that produces preferences or opinions to be subordinated to t= he greater whole. Democratic procedures (like voting, deliberation, polling= , or citizens’ assemblies) are all tools for processing those inputs = into legitimate outputs.

Even within the aggregative tradit= ion, some like John Stuart Mill argue that representative democracy can mak= e citizens as well as decisions. For Mill, even occasional participation in= public functions has a salutary effect on the citizen who takes part. R= 20;He is called upon,” Mill writes of the private citizen, “to = weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, b= y another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, prin= ciples and maxims which have for their reason of existence the general good= =2E”

Analyses of this type acknowledge that formation i= s a laudable goal and hope that representative institutions could supply so= me version of it through juries, local office, and the modest acts of publi= c engagement available to a private citizen. In practice, however, the sett= lement does not bear out these hopes. Over the century and a half since Mil= l’s reflections, the aggregative purposes of the system have steadily= eclipsed its formative functions. Few of us would today say that the syste= ms we live inside sharpen our faculty of self-governance or fellow-feeling.=

Parallel to the aggregation tradition is the formation-fir= st approach, best characterized by Alexis de Tocqueville in his travels acr= oss America in the 1830s. Tocqueville believed that the habits of self-rule= in the small things prepared people to rule themselves in the great ones. = The more citizens tested their judgments in the company of others, the more= resilient their characters became. Democracy stood or fell on these everyd= ay practices, for it was only through the rehearsal of judgment in everyday= life that citizens could learn the art of governing themselves.

Tocqueville knew what happened when those habits were no longer prese= nt. In the France he grew up in, centuries of monarchical centralization ha= d drawn the business of ordinary life away from local communities and into = the hands of the state, so that by the time the revolution spilled into the= streets, the citizens who were asked to govern themselves had long since l= ost the practice of doing so.

The provincial assemblies tha= t had once given ordinary people a say in their own affairs had been largel= y abolished; the guilds and local associations that had trained people in t= he small arts of collective decision-making had been suppressed; and the ar= istocratic class that had once served, however imperfectly, as a counterwei= ght to central power had been reduced to a decorative caste with titles but= no responsibilities.

Tocqueville imagined how this kind of= decay might unfold in a country that had skipped its aristocratic adolesce= nce. One danger was that citizens might willingly hand over the work of sel= f-government to a mild and far-seeing administrative state. He described a = “tutelary power” that “does not tyrannize, but it compres= ses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is r= educed to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of = which the government is the shepherd.”

Democratic deficit

Representative democracy= faces two distinct challenges within the aggregative tradition. The first = is a bandwidth problem, which reminds us that modern institutions can only = collect citizens’ views in a heavily compressed form - like a vote or= poll - that fails to capture most of what each citizen actually thinks. Th= e second is the deliberative problem. Here the kind of refining and filteri= ng Burke and Madison thought representative bodies were for has been overta= ken by the volume of political business and the professionalization of repr= esentatives.

The AI for democracy field is directed at the = first problem. It concerns capturing citizens’ views at higher fideli= ty and aggregating those inputs at scale. The deliberative deficit barely f= eatures beyond the comparatively narrow work of synthesizing information so= that officials can deliberate with better inputs. The formative concern, w= hich is about what civic life does to the citizens who take part in them, i= s not a significant part of the project.

A survey by S= eth Lazar and Lorenzo Manuali connects the field’s work to four modes= of usage:

  • Summarization: S= ynthesizing information in a way that officials or citizens can act more ef= fectively. One developed example is the Recursive Public project, which gathered public input on AI policy and used LLMs to summarize the resulting disc= ussions and group similar arguments into clusters in semantic space.=

  • Aggregat= ion: Generating new statements that the model predicts will = attract broader support than any of the originals. The Generative Social Ch= oice project, for example, took participants’ views on contested issues= and prompted a model to propose a slate of statements that a majority of p= articipants reported feeling “excellently” or “exceptiona= lly” represented by.

  • Representation: Predicting user pre= ferences by standing in for her in a simulated polity. See, for example, th= e Augmented Democracy project, which seeks “to create personalized AI r= epresentatives to augment their ability to participate directly in many dem= ocratic decisions.”

  • Facilitation: Engaging participants = in a structured conversation whereby the model plays the role of a discussi= on leader to keep conversations on topic, ask follow-up questions, draw rel= uctant participants into the exchange, and produce summaries at intervals. = See Rappler’s aiDialogue project.

All of the major labs have worked on projects that fall within these cate= gories, from Anthropic’s Collective Constitutional AI process designe= d to crowdso= urce Claude’s constitution to Google DeepMind’s Habermas Machine<= /a> that helps groups of individuals find consensus on political topi= cs.

These tools and others like them make it possibl= e to aggregate preferences more efficiently. They also provide the resultin= g decisions with a kind of legitimacy that any modern polity needs in order= to function. The decisions that constitute political life must be made som= ehow, and a procedure that draws as fully as possible on its citizens is by= most reasonable measures an improvement on the status quo.

Like the vast majority of AI and democracy projects, each of the examples = described above are concerned with aggregation rather than formation. An ac= curate clustering of a thousand Americans’ opinions about a frontier = model’s content policy does not give anyone the experience of having = governed themselves. A more efficient deliberative platform that drafts con= sensus statements between strangers does not produce the habits of self-rul= e that the Athenian Assembly or the New England town meeting cultivated thr= ough consequential practice over the course of an ordinary life.

The outputs look superficially similar in that citizens have played a= role, but they did so without the inward labor through which civic life ma= kes citizens. A citizen who has practiced forming and revising her own view= s in conversation with her peers is a better judge of political questions t= han someone whose preferences have been collected and aggregated by a model= =2E Rather than asking us to trade deci= sion quality for civic virtue, the for= mative tradition suggests both are the joint product of the same practice.<= /p>

An obvious response is to ask whether AI might be designed = to support a formative account of civic life. The temptation should be resi= sted. Formation is constituted by the experience of being responsible for c= onsequences alongside fellow citizens whose lives are bound up with yours. = There is no AI system, however carefully designed, that can deliver that.

While not straightforwardly citizen-making themselves, there= are uses of AI that could lower the cost of entry to formative practices. = A tool that helps a citizen convene like-minded peers does not help us grow= , but it does make the work of civic life easier to start. A system that tr= anslates a council planning document into something the resident affected b= y it can understand does not produce a citizen capable of self-rule, but it= may lower the transaction cost of participation through which such a citiz= en might be made.

Formative years

Tocqueville thought that juries were slower than judge= s and more likely to err on questions of law. If the only purpose of the co= urtroom was to produce the right verdict, the jury would have been abolishe= d long ago. “The jury teaches every man not to recoil before the resp= onsibility of his own actions,” he wrote, “and impresses him wi= th that manly confidence without which political virtue cannot exist.”= ;

Today, we think about governance as the process by which = decisions are taken on our behalf and implemented by specialists. This is i= n part a function of the highly complex nature of the modern world, which d= epends on large-scale coordination and deep technical specialization.

<= p style=3D"margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-s= ize: 16px;">Even so, the decisions that constitute political life are taken= at scales that far exceed the ceiling of the Tocquevillian model. The area= s that remain to citizens at the local level are administrative bodies oper= ating downstream of decisions taken elsewhere rather than deliberative bodi= es that make decisions and live with the results.

AI systems may well make political institutions more legitimate, mo= re efficient, and more responsive to our collective wants. On its own terms= , this is a good outcome if it helps democracies make better decisions acco= rding to the wishes of their people. But collecting and aggregating prefere= nces is not how we become more capable agents who can better take part in c= ivic life.

 
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