Rebooting Democracy in the Age of AI

What happens when the people working closest to families are forced to confront AI? In this conversation with Elana Banin, journalist Anya Kamenetz reflects on a three-day workshop that brought together service providers, advocates, technologists, policymakers, journalists, and philanthropists to wrestle with that question. The discussion explores why families have been largely absent from AI governance debates, how to shape the trajectory of technological change, and what it would take to build AI with communities rather than for them.

What can the World Cup's controversial VAR replay system teach us about deploying AI in government? In a new Reboot Democracy piece, Anirudh Dinesh argues that VAR's failures, such as addressing the wrong problem, ignoring stakeholder input, and eroding the human experience, are the same failures civic AI keeps making. Sarah Sachs and Tal Roded describe how the Block Party team turned 20 years of Manhattan Community Board 3 resolutions into a searchable public archive: democratic AI in practice. And in two new conversations, Beth Simone Noveck argues that universities should become laboratories for democratic problem-solving, and that AI should be judged not by efficiency alone but by whether it improves lives, expands participation, and helps institutions solve public problems.

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.