Collective Intelligence for Democracy and the Challenges of Decidim

Artificial intelligence is already everywhere, it has been socialised both in the public sphere and in our lives as a whole through direct or indirect applications within our daily digital diets. At the same time, major alarm bells have started to ring about its deployment and implementation because of the intrinsic risks that come with AI, be it the violation of fundamental rights or its impact on social and political life, and consequently on the ways of organising and governing society, therefore democracies.

The debate on the impact of AI on society must be opened up, but mechanisms must also be established to provide guarantees for society as a whole in order to preserve all its rights, establishing risk mitigation strategies. At the same time, AI inherits a large part of the open debates surrounding the big technology companies and the great concentration of power they monopolise, as they have done with the infrastructures that support digital or the main social networks that operate on a global scale. It will also be necessary to open the debate on public leadership and commitment to regulate and proactively guarantee new models of AI deployment at the service of the people, as well as to underpin the role of a demanding civil society that asserts the urgency of these debates and puts the citizenry as a whole at the centre.

However, it is worth opening another debate that we consider to be central, which has to do with the origin of the knowledge on which AI feeds, a universal and collective knowledge that in no case should be appropriated, and which must open up possibilities to be put at the service of society as a whole and the common good. What opportunities does AI offer us to understand and think about 21st century democracy, understanding its collective dimension? Can it be an instrument to strengthen democracies and people's capacity to take part in the management of common things? Can AI help to build more democratic societies?

Furthermore, in this session, the latest developments in the platform's development, redesign, and a presentation of the planned roadmap for the next two years, as well as monitoring and engagement tools to track progress, will be presented.

Language of the session: Catalan, with simultaneous translation into English.