Is AI compatible with democracy?

On authoritarianism and journalism in the Era of Cognitive Offloading.

“Turning Threads of Cognition,” by Hanna Barakat & Cambridge Diversity Fund. (Licensed by CC-BY 4.0)

One way to think about democracy is as the most cognitively demanding form of government we’ve got. And one way to think of journalists is as cognitive overburdeners, intruding on quiet lives with reports of natural disasters and tax legislation, not always successfully, not even in the old days.

“The number of periodical and occasional publications which appears in the United States actually surpasses belief,” Alexis du Tocqueville, a conservative aristocrat from France, quipped of his tour of the new republic in the early 1800s. “The most enlightened Americans attribute the subordinate influence of the press to this excessive dissemination; and it is adopted as an axiom of political science in that country that the only way to neutralize the effect of public journals is to multiply them indefinitely.”

So what happens to democratic culture when the infinite multiplication of media meets our Era of Cognitive Offloading? It doesn’t look good.

Informational ultra-abundance has yielded deteriorating intellectual performance. Even professional reporters I know, who are paid to keep an eye on things, are feeling news fatigue. U.S. student math and reading test scores have been consistently declining for the past decade, and I hardly go a week without reading a professor saying students aren’t even really writing anymore. Studies showing AI makes users dumber are detecting a feature, not a bug: Recommendation algorithms, chat agents and the endless scroll are popular features because they reduce the mental load to find relevant information. Reducing effort is the whole ballgame.

Cumulatively, our deteriorating collective cognition has been making it a lot easier for major problems to hide in plain sight. A recent survey of hundreds of U.S. investigative journalists from Investigative Reporters and Editors, which practically knocked me over, showed worrying signs of a decreasingly responsive public sphere:

While 58.9% of the respondents said their stories led to official investigations some or most of the time, that figure was 69.3% in the 2013 survey. Similarly, 23.6% reported seeing criminal charges filed based on their stories versus 29.8% last time.

The destruction of shared intellectual spaces and the inability to achieve some semblance of collective certainty corresponds with the ability of journalists to inflict social shame for outright lying. People used to be more worried about doing that sort of thing! I think about the comment given to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer after she obtained a letter by some reporting personal misconduct by soon-to-be U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:

Reached for comment, the author of the letter said, “If you print that, I will deny I wrote it.” When he was reminded that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses, he said, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.”

Increasingly, only charismatic attention-hijackers can reach broad audiences in exhausting information environments. It might be the populist politician dismantling a decrepit party establishment, or a dynamic content creator outpacing stuffy professional newsrooms as a source of information.

It seems clear to me how the rise of authoritarian populism is directly downstream from the deterioration of our capacities to participate in democratic culture.

Democracy is reading, democracy is conversation, democracy is meetings, democracy is consensus-finding — democracy is work. The plebiscitary strongman is the low-friction answer to high-friction civic life. He only needs one election on one date to rule. No further commitments by the public are necessary. Go about your life.

If somebody wants to delegate all their thinking to the AI or to the strongman because it’s easier, I guess we can’t stop them. But the enclosure of the American mind is a choice, not an inevitability. You can choose to be smaller and more comfortable, but isn’t there something inside you that wants to choose excellence? As the theater people say, there are no small parts, only small players.