Contributors
In this volume, a distinguished group of authors contributes their unique voices and perspectives on the topic of how artificial intelligence may alter our society and democracy. We thank the authors for taking on this challenge, for sharing their insights and ideas that will spark both academic and policy conversations about the role of digital technologies and the future of AI in a democratic society.
Lead Faculty
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LEAD FACULTY
CO-AUTHOR
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in America
Stanford Digital Economy Lab and Stanford Institute for Human- Centered AIErik Brynjolfsson is a professor, author, and inventor. At Stanford, he is a Professor at the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, with positions at the Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), the Economics Department, and the Graduate School of Business. His research and speaking focus on the economics of AI and digital technologies, including their effects on productivity, business strategy, and the future of work. Brynjolfsson is a best-selling author of several books, including The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. He has written over 200 academic articles and is one of the most widely cited researchers on the economics of AI. Brynjolfsson holds five patents and is the Cofounder of Workhelix, Inc., which helps companies identify opportunities for generative AI.
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LEAD FACULTY
CO-AUTHOR
Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation
CO-AUTHOR
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in AmericaStanford Digital Economy Lab and Stanford Institute for Human- Centered AI
Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland is a Stanford HAI Fellow, and has been awarded MIT’s Toshiba Endowed Professorship, membership in U.S. National Academies, and Board membership in UN Global Partnership Sustainable Development Data, Google Advanced Technology and Projects, Telefónica, AT&T, Nissan, and a variety of startup firms. He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, as well as health, news, and authentication startups that serve roughly a third of humanity. He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world.
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LEAD FACULTY
AUTHOR
Misunderstanding AI’s Democracy Problem
CO-AUTHOR
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in AmericaStanford Law School
Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and the Freeman Spogli Institute. He is the Founding Co-Director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and its Program on Democracy and the Internet. He is coauthor of the leading Election Law casebook, The Law of Democracy. He has served as a special master to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for numerous states and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim and Andrew Carnegie Fellow, examines the impact of social media and artificial intelligence on elections.
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LEAD FACULTY
CO-AUTHOR
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in AmericaHoover Institution, Stanford University
Condoleezza Rice is the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution and the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy. In addition, she is a Founding Partner of Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, an international strategic consulting firm. Rice was Stanford University’s Provost from 1993 to 1999 and has won two of the university’s highest teaching honors. From February 1989 through March 1991, Rice served on President George H.W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, and as Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs. Rice served as the 66th Secretary of State of the United States from January 2005 to January 2009 and as President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor from January 2001 to January 2005.
Senior Editor
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SENIOR EDITOR
CO-AUTHOR
Artificial Intelligence and Democracy in AmericaUniversity College London and Stanford University
Professor Angela Aristidou speaks, writes, and advises about the real-life deployment of artificial intelligence tools for public good. Her research spans the contexts of health, higher education, nonprofit, and humanitarian aid, in the UK, United States, Canada, and several Asian countries. Aristidou leads multidisciplinary research teams of social scientists, domain experts (e.g., tech, policy), and community leaders. Her research is published in management, medical, and interdisciplinary outlets and influences policymaking and industry practices. Her current work has been honored through a Stanford CASBS Award and a generous UK Research and Innovation Award. She specializes in strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London’s School of Management, is a Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and holds degrees from Cambridge and Harvard.
Authors
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CO-AUTHOR
Informational GPSGreg Beato has been writing about technology and culture since the early days of the World Wide Web. His work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Reason, Spin, Slate, The Guardian, and many other publications worldwide.
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CO-AUTHOR
The Potential for AI to Restore Local Community Connectedness, the Bedrock of a Healthy DemocracyOpenAI
Laura Bisesto is Chief of Staff to the Chief Financial Officer at OpenAI and the former Global Head of Policy and Privacy at Nextdoor, where she oversaw global content policy, AI ethics, public policy, privacy, and regulatory compliance. She led a diverse team of professionals and served as Chair of the Board of Directors of Internet Works, advocating for mid-size online platforms on intermediary liability issues in the U.S. Laura has extensive experience advising tech companies like Checkr, Verizon Media, and Lyft, and specializes in emerging regulatory environments. Laura began her career clerking at the California Supreme Court and as an Assistant District Attorney in San Diego and San Francisco. She holds a J.D. from the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco, and a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA.
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AUTHOR
AI, Society, and Democracy: Just RelaxHoover Institution, Stanford University; Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR); Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); and Cato Institute
John H. Cochrane is the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. He specializes in asset pricing and monetary economics. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, time-series econometrics, and financial regulation. Books include The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and Asset Pricing (Princeton University Press). He writes occasional Op-eds, mostly in the Wall Street Journal, and blogs as “The Grumpy Economist.” Before joining Hoover, Cochrane was a Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Cochrane earned a BA in Physics at MIT, and earned his PhD in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.
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CO-AUTHOR
The Potential for AI to Restore Local Community Connectedness, the Bedrock of a Healthy Democracy
OpenAISarah Friar is the CFO of OpenAI. OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. As CEO of Nextdoor, she led the company to nearly triple its reach to over 92 million Neighbors in 335,000 neighborhoods worldwide. As CFO at Square, she oversaw its IPO and $30 billion market cap increase.” Her prior experience spans Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Salesforce. Currently a Board Member of Walmart and Consensys, she’s also known for her Board contributions to Slack and New Relic. A Fellow of the Aspen Institute, she serves on the Global Board of Operation HOPE and the International Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, and she is is Co-Chair of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab’s Advisory Group. Friar is committed to mentorship, founding LadiesWhoLaunch. org. Raised in Northern Ireland, she holds degrees from Oxford and Stanford, earning an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II for entrepreneurship.
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CO-AUTHOR
Techno-Ideologies of the Twenty-first CenturyAnomaly and Harvard University
Mona Hamdy is the Founder and Managing Director of Anomaly, a data services provider network, and is a Teaching Fellow of Applied Ethics at Harvard. Hamdy cofounded the Al Baydha Development Corporation, a regional regenerative land development company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Prior to that she was the Executive Director of the Mosaic Foundation, a cultural and educational non-profit comprised of the spouses of the Arab ambassadors posted in Washington DC. Hamdy is an Advisor to the University of California, Berkeley’s SkyDeck AI and blockchain accelerator, serves as the MENAregion chair of the Harvard Women in Defense, Diplomacy, and Development (HW3D), and sits on the World Bank Special Council on the SDGs. She is a civic sector Advisory Board Member of the Bretton Woods Committee, and a Board alumna of the Washington, DC-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
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CO-AUTHOR
Informational GPSGreylock Partners
Reid Hoffman is the Cofounder of LinkedIn, Cofounder of Inflection AI, and Partner at Greylock. He currently serves on the Boards of companies such as Aurora, Coda, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, and Nauto. He also serves on the Boards of several nonprofits, such as Kiva, Endeavor, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network, New America, Opportunity@Work, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and the MacArthur Foundation’s Lever for Change. He is the host of the Masters of Scale and Possible podcasts, and is the coauthor of five best-selling books: The Startup of You, The Alliance, Blitzscaling, Masters of Scale, and Impromptu. He earned an MA in Philosophy from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA with distinction in Symbolic Systems from Stanford.
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CO-AUTHOR
A Vision of Democratic AICollective Intelligence Project
Saffron Huang is the Cofounder and Research Director of the Collective Intelligence Project. She was previously a Research Engineer at DeepMind investigating large language models, human-AI interaction, value alignment, and multi-agent reinforcement learning, and she has worked on technology governance research with organizations such as the Harvard Berkman Klein Center.
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AUTHOR
Protected Democracy
Harvard Law SchoolLawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, where he was the Berkman Professor of Law until 2000, Lessig was a Professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He was a Cofounder of Creative Commons, and serves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund. Lessig is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award and the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award. He holds a BA in Economics and a BS in Management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.
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AUTHOR
Getting AI RightGoogle and Alphabet
James Manyika is President for Research, Technology & Society and focuses on Google and Google DeepMind’s most ambitious foundational and applied innovations in AI, Computing and Science and on areas with potential for beneficial impact on society. Manyika serves as Vice Chair of the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee and is Co-Chair of the UN Secretary- General’s High-Level Advisory Body on AI. He is Chair and Director, Emeritus of McKinsey Global Institute, a Visiting Professor and a Distinguished Research Fellow in Ethics and AI at Oxford, a Distinguished Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A Rhodes Scholar, Manyika has DPhil, MSc, and MA degrees from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, and a BSc from the University of Zimbabwe.
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CO-AUTHOR
Techno-Ideologies of the Twenty-first CenturyJDA Worldwide and The Congress of Christian Leaders
Rev. Johnnie Moore, PhD, is a global evangelical leader best known for his consequential work at the intersection of faith and foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Rev. Moore is a popular author, teacher, businessperson, and acclaimed human rights and religious freedom activist whose effective advocacy has materially impacted policy in many nations. Rev. Moore’s awards and honors include the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s prestigious Medal of Valor. He was twice appointed to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom by the President of the United States, and in 2023 he was named one of the world’s top 25 “young visionaries” by the Jerusalem Post for his peacemaking work among Arabs and Israelis. He is President of JDA Worldwide and President of the Congress of Christian Leaders.
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AUTHOR
AI Meets the Cascade of RigidityNiskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists
Jennifer Pahlka is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center and at the Federation of American Scientists, and a Senior Advisor to the Abundance Network. She served as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States and was a Member of the Defense Innovation Board. She founded the award-winning nonprofit Code for America, which she led for ten years, and cofounded U.S. Digital Response. Pahlka was selected by WIRED magazine as one of the people who have most shaped technology and society in the past 25 years. Ezra Klein called her book Recoding America “the book I wish all policymakers would read.”
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AUTHOR
Democracy 2.0
Former CEO and Chairman of GoogleEric Schmidt is an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001 and helped grow the company from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology alongside founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Eric served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman from 2001 to 2011, as well as Executive Chairman and Technical Advisor. Under his leadership, Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation. Eric founded the Special Competitive Studies Project in 2021, a nonprofit initiative focused on strengthening America’s long-term AI and technological competitiveness in national security, the economy, and society. Most recently, he and his wife Wendy co-founded Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit organization working to advance science and technology that deepens human understanding of the natural world and develops solutions to global issue.
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CO-AUTHOR
A Vision of Democratic AICollective Intelligence Project
Divya Siddarth is the Cofounder and Executive Director of the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP), an experimental research organization that advances collective intelligence capabilities for the democratic and effective governance of transformative technologies. CIP has built democratic governance models for AI with OpenAI, Anthropic, the UK AI Safety Institute, Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, the Creative Commons Foundation, and other partners. She was formerly Associate Political Economist and Social Technologist at Microsoft, and also holds positions at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford, the Ostrom Workshop, and the Plurality Lab at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics.
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CO-AUTHOR
A Vision of Democratic AICollective Intelligence Project
Audrey Tang, a TIME100 “Most Influential People in AI” honoree, is Taiwan’s first Digital Minister and the world’s first nonbinary cabinet minister (2016–2024). In 2014, she helped broadcast the demands of Sunflower Movement activists, and worked to resolve conflicts during a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s Legislature. Tang became a reverse mentor to the minister in charge of digital participation, before holding the role from 2016 to 2024 during the Tsai Ing-wen administration. Tang helped develop participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join, bringing civic innovation into the public sector through initiatives like the Presidential Hackathon and Ideathon. Other accomplishments for Tang include shaping Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed COVID-19 response, as well as safeguarding the country’s 2024 presidential and legislative elections from cyber interference.
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CO-AUTHOR
Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic ParticipationMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Lily L. Tsai is the Director and Founder of the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT, as well as the former Chair of the MIT Faculty. Her research focuses on accountability, governance, and political participation in developing contexts, particularly in Asia and Africa. In 2014, she founded MIT GOV/LAB, a group of social and behavioral scientists and design researchers who develop and test innovations in citizen engagement and government responsiveness. By focusing on how and why citizens become active in engaging their governments, Tsai aims to bridge researcher and practitioner communities by developing learning collaborations that can respond to governance challenges using empirical evidence in real time.
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AUTHOR
Generative AI and Political PowerHoover Institution, Stanford University, and UCLA School of Law
Eugene Volokh is the Thomas M. Siebel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor at the UCLA School of Law. Volokh has written extensively about First Amendment law since 1992, about law and computer technology since 1995, and about law and AI since his article “Chief Justice Robots,” 68 Duke L.J. 1135 (2019).
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CO-AUTHOR
Techno-Ideologies of the Twenty-first CenturyMicrosoft Research Plural Technology Collaboratory, the RadicalxChange Foundation, and the Plurality Institute
E. (Eric) Glen Weyl is co-author of 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy and Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. He is Founder of the RadicalxChange Foundation, the Plurality Institute, and the Plural Technology Collaboratory. He is Executive Producer of Good Enough Ancestor: The Audrey Tang Story. He was Valedictorian of his Princeton class in 2007 and received his PhD in Economics in 2008 from the same. In 2018 he was named by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the 50 people shaping business, by WIRED as one of the 25 people shaping the next 25 years of technology, and by CoinDesk as one of the 10 most influential people in blockchain.