Taiwan and UK launch AI-mediated citizen deliberation projects
Taiwan’s Audrey Tang and UK’s Sir Matthew Rycroft are deploying digital tools to enhance participatory democracy. Both initiatives aim to use structured deliberation and AI to resolve policy conflicts and create long-term national strategies.
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former digital affairs minister, has detailed how digital deliberation mechanisms have resolved significant policy conflicts in the country. In 2014, a three-week peaceful occupation involving half a million people led to the convergence of ideas on a trade agreement with Beijing, which parliament subsequently passed. In 2015, a similar online process without reply buttons resolved the Uber licensing dispute, resulting in nine measures that passed into law. To combat deepfake scams, which peaked in 2024 with fake videos of figures like Jensen Huang, Tang sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers to gather ideas. A randomly selected group of 447 people deliberated in tables of ten, proposing measures such as labeling online ads and holding Facebook liable for losses. These measures achieved over 85% adoption and were passed by parliament in two months, reducing deepfake scams to 1% of their previous levels. Tang is now working to reimagine AI as 'assistive intelligence' rather than 'authoritarian intelligence,' emphasizing that the deliberation process can run without data centers, operating entirely on personal laptops using specialized language models.
In the United Kingdom, Sir Matthew Rycroft, former Home Office head and UN ambassador, has co-founded the National Strategy Project to address what he describes as a governance system unfit for purpose. The project aims to produce a national strategy before the next general election by engaging citizens in deliberation. Partners include YouGov, Stanford University, and the University of Cambridge. The first phase, 'UK in one room,' will involve 500 representative citizens selected by YouGov deliberating over a weekend on four major issues: economy, democracy and aging population, UK's global role and national security, and service provision. Subsequent phases will involve mass online deliberation with hundreds of thousands or millions of people, moderated and analyzed by AI in small groups of 12. The project is apolitical and intends to require all candidates to answer questions based on informed public consent. A fourth phase, the 'Institute for Our Nation,' will be established to ensure action is taken on the resulting strategy.