Related papers: SETI and Democracy
The right to contest a decision with consequences on individuals or the society is a well-established democratic right. Despite this right also being explicitly included in GDPR in reference to automated decision-making, its study seems to…
What would SETI Beacon transmitters be like if built by civilizations with a variety of motivations, but who cared about cost? We studied in a companion paper how, for fixed power density in the far field, we could build a cost-optimum…
In times marked by political turbulence and uncertainty, as well as increasing divisiveness and hyperpartisanship, Governments need to use every tool at their disposal to understand and respond to the concerns of their citizens. We study…
This paper highlights a methodological approach designed to enhance the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by hypothesizing that a transmission technosignature would likely have two features: 1) be wideband in the microwave or…
Social bots are currently regarded an influential but also somewhat mysterious factor in public discourse and opinion making. They are considered to be capable of massively distributing propaganda in social and online media and their…
We compare different actual forms of democracy and analyse in which way they are variations of a 'natural consensus decision process'. We analyse how 'consensus decision followed by majority voting' is open to 'false play' by the majority,…
There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and…
As AI-enabled systems become available for political campaign outreach, an important question has received little empirical attention: how do people evaluate the communicative practices these systems represent, and what consequences do…
Publicly deploying research chatbots is a nuanced topic involving necessary risk-benefit analyses. While there have recently been frequent discussions on whether it is responsible to deploy such models, there has been far less focus on the…
This position paper encourages the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community to focus on designing deliberative processes to inform and coordinate technology and policy design for large language models (LLMs) -- a `societal-scale…
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…
Trust and confidence in democratic institutions is at an all-time low. At the same time, many of the complex issues faced by city administrators and politicians remain unresolved. To tackle these concerns, many argue that citizens should,…
A radio telescope placed in lunar orbit, or on the surface of the Moon's farside, could be of great value to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). The advantage of such a telescope is that it would be shielded by the body of…
Why do users follow moral advice from chatbots? A chatbot is not an authoritative moral advisor, but it can generate seemingly plausible arguments. Users do not follow reasoned more readily than unreasoned advice, though, we find in an…
As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to integrate…
When a human receives a prediction or recommended course of action from an intelligent agent, what additional information, beyond the prediction or recommendation itself, does the human require from the agent to decide whether to trust or…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
Effective human-AI collaboration requires a system design that provides humans with meaningful ways to make sense of and critically evaluate algorithmic recommendations. In this paper, we propose a way to augment human-AI collaboration by…
The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been conducted for over sixty years, yet no technosignatures have been identified. Previous studies have focused on stars in our galaxy, with few searches in the extragalactic…
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public administration is expanding rapidly, moving from automating routine tasks to deploying generative and agentic systems that autonomously act on goals. While AI promises greater efficiency and…