Democracy is a set of processes that create spaces for dissensus and radical equality. Kalervo N. Gulson and Greg Thompson argue that nowhere is the lack of democratic spaces more evident than in the field of technology and its impact on institutions and life
We are living through times in which democracy is constantly under threat. Despots, game show hosts and terrorists vie with data breaches, artificial intelligence and killer robots to end democracy as we know it. We could offer any number of apocryphal examples to highlight the challenges of realising and maintaining democracy.
Understanding the particular challenges of technology is critically important because ‘public’ spaces are diminishing year-on-year, especially with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. As this series on the Science of Democracy demonstrates, the democracy of today is never the democracy of the past. New sociotechnical forms of political knowledge, economy and technology are constantly emerging. For this reason, we agree with Jacques Rancière: any claim to democracy must be predicated on the creation of spaces for dissensus rather than consensus.
A challenge for democracy is to create space for ‘the people’ who are rarely able to make their voices heard on their own terms. Democracy is not an order of rule as much as an orientation to space that has become co-opted as a means of legitimating a particular mode of government. Any democratic response to the challenge of technology, and associated sociotechnical controversies, must create and maintain spaces for dissensus for experts and non-experts alike.
We create and maintain these spaces so that those who do not have the right to speak, or those who have lost it, can be heard. What guides these spaces is not the hammering out of consensus. Rather, it is the opportunity for dissensus, to have and hold different views on a sociotechnical problem.
As Rancière writes:
...there is democracy if there is a specific sphere where the people appear. There is democracy if there are specific political performers who are neither agents of the state apparatus nor parts of society, if there are groups that displace identities as far as parts of the state or of society go. Lastly, there is democracy if there is a dispute conducted by a nonidentary subject on the stage where the people emerge
Disagreement: Politics and philosophy, university of minnesota press, 2004
Given the power of technology to determine government and to shape people’s lives, making technology more radically democratic is vital. Technical democracy responds to the imperative for a more radical definition of democracy by creating spaces for experts and non-experts to meet around problems. Our particular interest lies in what technical democracy means for education and schools.
Formal schooling is a globally compulsory activity for children, and one with increasing participation for those over 12 years of age. Yet, paradoxically, schools are producing citizens in an undemocratic way. We believe that experiments in technical democracy may also be most fruitful in the field of public education. Experiments, especially with regard to automated technology and its impact in schools and classrooms, are important.
For example, the release of ChatGPT in 2022 highlighted the limits of depending on policy and regulation to guide the use of technology. Some schools and systems decided to ban its use, preaching caution about its unknown implications. Some, by contrast, allowed students to experiment with it.
ChatGPT entered a policy landscape where schools and education systems made decisions that were mostly well beyond educators’ areas of expertise
ChatGPT entered a policy landscape where schools and education systems made decisions that were mostly well beyond educators’ areas of expertise. Guidelines for using AI in schools remain opaque about how AI works, and what it can, and should, do or not do.
Technical democracy sees automated technology as a matter of concern about sociotechnical controversies. Thus, technical democracy enters the realms of expertise and decision-making.
But how might we approach the complexity of sociotechnical controversies without the presumed inequality produced by technical experts? This question has, for example, been driving a collective approach to AI and automated technologies in education.
First, as Michael Callon and colleagues propose, technical democracy brings the idea of science and research into the wild. It forces expertise into a realm in which we can create new kinds of problems and solutions. Technical democracy depends on multiple kinds of expertise and experiences, where co-learning takes place between experts and non-experts.
In the case of complex technologies like AI, the tendency of those in charge is to 'effectively remove it from the influence of public debate’. Technical democracy demands instead that ‘to recognise its social dimension restores its chance of being discussed in political arenas’. Technical democracy refuses to let expertise define what it means to be 'a public'. Hence, it denies that we already know how we should and could respond to automated technologies.
Technical democracy calls for a ‘democratisation of democracy’, allowing previously unheard voices to share their concerns about automated technologies
This denial of one possibility opens up another kind. Technical democracy calls for a ‘democratisation of democracy’. This closing down of default expert legitimacy and status allows previously unheard voices to share their concerns about automated technologies. Amid this shared uncertainty and 'moments of democratisation', democracy is not only acknowledged, but produced. No one system of thought is enough to deal with sociotechnical controversies.
Experts may embrace this uncertainty about their disciplinary tools. Non-experts, the unheard, should embrace the uncertainty that experts hold all the solutions. This opening provides the opportunity for new kinds of publics to appear. It is the methodological production of a dissensus view of democracy where uncertainty does not mean that technology endangers democracy. Rather, it is a richer site of experimentation about, and with, technology.
No.110 in a Loop thread on the Science of Democracy. Look out for the 🦋 to read more
