Democracy has a listening problem. These AI tools could actually help
When four-year-old Joca, a golden retriever with dark soulful eyes, died on a scorching Brazilian tarmac after an airline’s tragic mistake, the nation’s outrage could have remained just another trending hashtag. But Fernando, a young man in São Paulo, submitted an online legislative proposal for “Joca’s law.” Senators held a hearing, and eventually the Senate and the House passed legislation. While most online engagement today amounts to clicking, liking, and sharing—what the late political theorist Benjamin Barber called “the caverns of private solitude”—Brazil’s system shows how institutions might use digital tools differently. In 1999, I saw both the promise and peril of using technology to create that participatory spirit. Working with Barber, I built Unchat, the first software designed specifically for democratic deliberation. With his distinctive baritone voice and youthful cowlick, Barber, who died in 2017, was fond of arguing that democracy, if it is to survive the assaults of hostile modernity, needs to do more than enable free speech. It needs to give citizens the power to decide and act. Unchat allowed groups to come together to debate, discuss, and decide across distances. Uniquely, the software enabled each participant to take turns moderating the conversation, with control rotating after a set time. This was an intentional construction to encourage fairness and collective decision making. Our aim wasn’t just to enable talk for its own sake, but to create opportunities for practical participation, where citizens actively shape political decisions. The late 1990s were heady times for those who believed in the transformative potential of the World Wide Web to reimagine democracy. Vint Cerf, one of the internet’s architects—rarely seen without his signature three-piece suit and French cuffs—remarked that, with the Internet’s capacity for two-way communication, “[p]eople could provide feedback. I think a lot of legislators originally thought of the Net as a