Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

Billions of people are about to watch the World Cup. And millions of them will spend part of it furious, not at the teams, but at football's most contentious technology: the Video Assistant Referee. In this article, Anirudh Dinesh argues we are making the same mistake in how we design, build, and use AI, and shares four lessons VAR can teach us about what happens when you build tech without asking who it's actually meant for.

Local government generates enormous amounts of public knowledge, but much of it remains buried in disconnected PDFs and difficult-to-navigate archives. This post explores how the Block Party team used AI, semantic search, and human expertise to build a searchable archive of 17 years of Manhattan Community Board 3 resolutions, making local government decisions, institutional memory, and civic participation more accessible to residents, journalists, and public officials.

As AI transforms how we work, learn, and govern, what role should universities play? In this wide-ranging conversation, Beth Noveck argues that universities should become laboratories for democratic problem-solving, where students work with communities to address public challenges. She outlines a vision for "democratic AI" that puts public purpose, participation, and impact at the center of technological innovation.