Overview
“Democracy Rewired” examines how artificial intelligence is fundamentally challenging the foundations of democratic society. Published by the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society in August 2025, this five-part essay series argues that AI presents both unprecedented threats to democratic values and potential opportunities to strengthen them, but only with deliberate governance and proactive policy intervention.
The central question driving this analysis is: How can democracies ensure AI strengthens their values rather than undermining them? The authors conclude that without thoughtful action to align AI development with democratic principles, we risk a future where authoritarian states and private corporations, rather than democratic institutions, control this transformative technology.
Section 1: AI and Democratic Governance
Why This Matters: This section reveals a critical vulnerability in democratic systems. They’re too slow to effectively regulate rapidly evolving AI technology.
Key Issues:
- Speed Mismatch: Democratic processes take years to develop regulations, while AI advances in months. Canada’s AI legislation died in Parliament after becoming obsolete due to generative AI breakthroughs.
- Expertise Gap: AI knowledge is concentrated in private companies, leaving governments and citizens unable to understand or effectively oversee these powerful systems.
- Power Concentration: Major AI development is dominated by a handful of tech giants with resources and partnerships (like OpenAI-Microsoft, Anthropic-Amazon) that enable rapid global deployment.
The Risk: If democratic governments can’t regulate AI effectively, control shifts to either corporate self-regulation (prioritizing profits over public interest) or authoritarian governments that can act quickly but without democratic oversight. And the Digital Era (1998-2025) has proven that profits are winning out over ethics across most sectors of business.
Section 2: Individual Freedoms and AI
Why This Matters: AI is eroding two fundamental pillars of democracy, privacy and personal autonomy, in ways that could make democratic participation impossible.
Privacy Under Attack:
- AI transforms ordinary surveillance (security cameras, data collection) into powerful tools for tracking and controlling citizens. Computer technologies allow for all of these separate data fields to be brought together in a single file, to be used in a variety of covert ways that most people do not understand.
- Facial recognition can identify protesters instantly; predictive policing can prevent demonstrations before they start.
- This creates a “chilling effect” where people self-censor rather than risk being monitored.
Autonomy Under Threat:
- AI generates realistic fake images and videos for political manipulation.
- Hyper-personalized content targets individuals based on their psychological profiles to sway their political views.
- AI-generated content floods the information ecosystem, making it harder to distinguish truth from fiction.
- Creative and journalistic professions face displacement, reducing the diversity of voices needed for democratic discourse.
Why It’s Critical: Democracy requires citizens who can think independently and participate freely in political life. Without privacy and autonomy, democratic deliberation becomes unlikely or even impossible.
Section 3: Balancing AI and Social Cohesion
Why This Matters: Democracy isn’t just about individual rights, it requires people to work together, build consensus, and take collective action. AI is fracturing these social bonds.
How AI Divides Society:
- Algorithmic “filter bubbles” trap people in personalized echo chambers, preventing exposure to diverse viewpoints.
- Revenue-driven algorithms amplify divisive content because conflict drives engagement.
- AI-powered “astroturfing” creates fake grassroots movements, making it impossible to distinguish genuine public opinion from manufactured consensus.
- Advocacy groups lose their ability to mobilize and amplify marginalized voices as AI-generated content drowns out authentic human expression.
Positive Potential:
- AI tools like Taiwan’s vTaiwan platform can facilitate large-scale democratic deliberation.
- AI can help process public input, translate languages, and make complex policy issues more accessible.
- Advocacy organizations can use AI to analyze data and amplify their messaging.
The Challenge: Most AI development is controlled by private companies focused on profit, not democratic values. Without intervention, the divisive applications will likely dominate.
Section 4: The Evolution of Sovereignty in the Age of AI
Why This Matters: AI operates across borders, potentially undermining nations’ ability to govern themselves and make independent decisions.
Sovereignty at Risk:
- Digital Extractivism: Companies extract data from countries worldwide but develop profitable AI models elsewhere, creating economic dependency.
- Election Interference: AI enables unprecedented manipulation of democratic processes across national boundaries (Cambridge Analytica was just the beginning).
- Security Vulnerabilities: AI-powered autonomous weapons and cyber capabilities can penetrate national defences and critical infrastructure.
- Policy Influence: Countries without strong AI capabilities become dependent on foreign technology and subject to the policies of AI-developing nations.
The Global Challenge:
- Democratic nations compete with authoritarian states (particularly China) that can rapidly deploy AI for social control.
- Countries face a difficult choice: maintain independence and fall behind technologically, or integrate with global AI systems and risk losing sovereignty.
Proposed Solution: International governance frameworks that establish shared standards while protecting state autonomy, similar to post-war international institutions but designed for the digital age.
Section 5: A New Social Contract for an AI-Enabled World
Why This Matters: The fundamental agreement between citizens and government (the social contract) assumes human agency and rational decision-making. AI challenges these basic assumptions.
The Problem:
- The social contract depends on humans’ ability to think rationally and make informed decisions.
- AI agents can now perform many functions once exclusive to humans (creating content, making logical decisions, working tirelessly).
- AI manipulates the information environment, undermining humans’ ability to think clearly and act rationally.
- Traditional concepts of human agency become meaningless when AI systems can influence or replace human decision-making.
Essential Elements of a New Social Contract:
- Affirm Human Agency: Rights to have certain decisions made entirely by humans, or at minimum, transparency about AI involvement in decisions.
- Protect Democratic Participation: Safeguard people’s ability to organize, deliberate, and shape societal values.
- Maintain State Authority: Ensure governments retain legitimate power to regulate AI and protect citizens’ interests.
- Establish New Rights: Create protections against novel AI threats (digital replication, AI-influenced punishment) and potentially new legal categories for AI agents themselves.
- This is not a zero sum game. Regulation fuels innovation once everyone knows the rules. Yet our Government refuses to regulate due to concerns of reducing innovation. That approach is not working and should be reconsidered.
Three Requirements for Success:
- Political commitment to maintain democratic stability.
- Integration of democratic values into AI system design and technical standards.
- New governance structures to oversee human-AI interactions
Conclusion: The Stakes
This report argues that we’re at a critical juncture. AI will either strengthen democracy by enhancing participation, transparency, and collective decision-making, or it will undermine democracy by concentrating power, manipulating citizens, and fragmenting social cohesion.
The path forward requires immediate action across multiple fronts: updating regulations, protecting individual rights, fostering social cohesion, establishing international cooperation, and fundamentally rethinking the relationship between citizens, government, and technology.
Without this comprehensive approach, the authors warn, we risk a future where democratic values are subordinated to the interests of tech companies and authoritarian states that can deploy AI more quickly and ruthlessly than democratic societies constrained by deliberative processes and individual rights.
The central irony is that democracy’s greatest strengths, deliberation, consultation, respect for individual autonomy, may become its greatest vulnerabilities in the age of AI unless we act decisively to preserve them.
