{"id":625569,"date":"2026-04-24T13:00:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T13:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/625569\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T13:00:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T13:00:08","slug":"is-our-current-form-of-politics-capable-of-governing-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/625569\/","title":{"rendered":"Is our current form of politics capable of governing AI?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the Vector artificial intelligence research institute in Toronto, on Nov. 7, 2025.Sammy Kogan\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the floor at the recent Liberal convention, he described a future where artificial intelligence<\/a> benefits all Canadians \u2013 not just a lucky few.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal is AI for all,\u201d he said at event. \u201cAI governed by Canadian values, accountable to Canadians and serving Canadians.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s an optimistic vision. But according to political theorist H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Landemore and democratic innovator Peter MacLeod, our current political system just isn\u2019t capable of delivering on it. <\/p>\n

Instead, Landemore, a Yale professor and the author of Politics Without Politicians, argues that ordinary citizens \u2013 not politicians \u2013 should be the ones calling the shots. MacLeod has spent more than 20 years putting that idea into practice in Canada. His new book is Democracy\u2019s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public.<\/p>\n

This an excerpt from the latest episode of Machines Like Us<\/a>, The Globe\u2019s podcast about technology and people, hosted by Taylor Owen.<\/p>\n

Machines Like Us: Does 21st-century politics still need politicians?<\/a><\/p>\n

Taylor Owen: Peter, you say democracy is stuck. Why?<\/p>\n

Peter MacLeod: Well, because for the past 30 or 40 years, we\u2019ve been watching all of the trend lines pointing in the wrong direction. The reality is that political parties are largely hollowed out in the West. Their memberships have collapsed. Voter turnout continues to decline and trust and confidence in government continues to erode.<\/p>\n

H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, you say it\u2019s not just the system that needs fixing, it\u2019s the politicians themselves.<\/p>\n

H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Landemore: I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that the selection mechanism for legislators is partly at fault. It\u2019s a very oligarchic selection mechanism. So it\u2019s no surprise when you send to power the representatives of socio-economic elites that you end up with a system that is overly responsive to the affluent, as has been measured consistently for the last 40 years in political science studies. <\/p>\n

And we can try to fix it at the margin by trying to take money out of politics, but I actually think we might want to consider a system that would be purely based on sortition. Whereby you would send to the legislature a [randomly selected] representative sample [of the public]. And I think if you had a sample like that in power, you would end up with laws that are much more for the majority. <\/p>\n

You both argue we should expect more of citizens, not less. What does that look like in practice?<\/p>\n

MacLeod: Most people are at best a spectator to democracy. We have a tendency to tell this account of a public that is too emotional, too ignorant and too apathetic to get involved. But I think apathy is a kind of fancy word for blaming the victim. I think people look at what\u2019s on offer and they recognize that actually they\u2019re not all that welcome and the opportunities to make a difference are very few.<\/p>\n

Peter, you\u2019ve spent the last 20 years doing citizens\u2019 assemblies. How do they work? <\/p>\n

MacLeod: The best comparison is one that most people are familiar with, and that\u2019s a jury. Letters are sent out to thousands of households. They\u2019re invited to spend as many as 12 days examining a single topic. Then, you\u2019ve got all of these people in the room. What do you do with them? And they have the opportunity to hear from each other, to change their minds, to have access to experts. But here\u2019s the kicker. They work towards finding consensus. The challenge to assembly members isn\u2019t to jam your angle and work your wedge. It\u2019s to find common ground with people.<\/p>\n

H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, you describe assemblies as being filled with love, which is a striking way to describe politics. What do you mean by that? <\/p>\n

Landemore: That came straight from observation because I didn\u2019t really anticipate it. There was no room for it in my theoretical framework going in. Within two to three meetings, most people in the assembly were starting to express their feelings for each other in the vocabulary of love. There is a character in my book named Omar \u2013 and when I asked one of his colleagues to tell me what he thought of Omar, he said, \u201cOh, Omar, I fell in love with him on the first day.\u201d That\u2019s not friendship. I saw them hug. I saw them console each other. One of them said, \u201cwe were like a family.\u201d And so it was very hard to not be touched by it. <\/p>\n

MacLeod: I think what creates this solidarity and this kind of love is, often for the first time in people\u2019s lives, they feel like they matter and they count. Most people go through life without their employer caring what they like or want. Many of their family relations are not especially affirmative or democratic. And public life has been something that happens over there. So people feel recognized and affirmed, and they come to feel a greater and expanded sense of their own self-worth. Why wouldn\u2019t you want to create politics that regularly produces that sense of solidarity and self-worth \u2013 not for the few, but for the many?<\/p>\n

AI governance has stumped politicians, regulators and the tech industry alike. Could citizens\u2019 assemblies crack it?<\/p>\n

Landemore: Yes, I do see it as a path forward. Currently I just see elected legislatures quite captured by the tech industry and incapable or unwilling to regulate. Assuming those problems could be solved, what are the questions I would put to citizens\u2019 assemblies? Well, for the convenience of being able to use ChatGPT every day, how much are you willing to pay in additional electricity costs, in depletion of natural resources, in the increased risks of war over rare minerals? These are the trade-offs that citizens are good at dealing with. But the difficulty is not coming up with questions. It\u2019s really how we\u2019re going to get the money and the political will to make any of this happen when governments are more or less in the hands of these tech companies.<\/p>\n

MacLeod: I think what you would get from a citizens\u2019 assembly on any of these questions is a greater adherence to the precautionary principle \u2013 to be a little more conservative, a little more guarded against some of the risks. You\u2019d expect citizens to be less interested in business success and quarterly returns, and much more interested in the public, environmental, social and broader economic impacts that are at stake.<\/p>\n

Some argue AI could replace human deliberation entirely with so-called \u201csynthetic publics.\u201d What do you make of that?<\/p>\n

MacLeod: If we accept that one of the greatest problems in democracy right now is that people feel cut off from it and cut off from one another \u2013 at a moment where our politics may become more extreme because of the very real lack of solidarity that so many people feel \u2013 I don\u2019t understand how introducing robots to the equation is supposed to rekindle that sense of solidarity.<\/p>\n

Landemore: The change of preferences that happens in deliberation is not just in reaction to good arguments \u2013 it\u2019s also a reaction to the love and the solidarity you start feeling for the people with whom you deliberate. If you automate everything to an agentic AI that takes your preferences as given, you will not be able to synthesize that solidarity, because we are human creatures. <\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note: AI tools assisted with condensing the original podcast transcript, which was then reviewed and edited by the Machines Like Us team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at the Vector artificial intelligence research institute in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625570,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,901,276,277,888,902,879,877,903,49,48,876,895,896,891,878,875,46,549,295,894,887,914,880,881,893,889,890,884,904,885,909,910,912,907,911,905,908,882,898,899,714,897,906,865,61,900,892,886,883,913],"class_list":{"0":"post-625569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alberta","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-arts-news","13":"tag-bc","14":"tag-breaking-news","15":"tag-breaking-news-video","16":"tag-british-columbia","17":"tag-ca","18":"tag-canada","19":"tag-canada-news","20":"tag-canada-sports","21":"tag-canada-sports-news","22":"tag-canada-trafficcanada-weather","23":"tag-canadian-breaking-news","24":"tag-canadian-news","25":"tag-economy","26":"tag-education","27":"tag-environment","28":"tag-federal-government","29":"tag-foreign-news","30":"tag-globe-and-mail","31":"tag-globe-and-mail-breaking-news","32":"tag-globe-and-mail-canada-news","33":"tag-government","34":"tag-life-news","35":"tag-lifestyle","36":"tag-local-news","37":"tag-manitoba","38":"tag-national-news","39":"tag-new-brunswick","40":"tag-newfoundland-and-labrador","41":"tag-northwest-territories","42":"tag-nova-scotia","43":"tag-nunavut","44":"tag-ontario","45":"tag-pei","46":"tag-photos","47":"tag-political-news","48":"tag-political-opinion","49":"tag-politics","50":"tag-politics-news","51":"tag-quebec","52":"tag-sports-news","53":"tag-technology","54":"tag-travel","55":"tag-trudeau","56":"tag-us-news","57":"tag-world-news","58":"tag-yukon"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}