Rethinking Democracy for the Age of AI

Bruce Schneier argues that Industrial-Age democratic and market systems are misaligned with the Information Age, where incentives and loophole exploitation scale via technologies like AI, raising the risk and cost of governance failures; he reframes governance as an information system that should better align individual and societal incentives, resist manipulation, operate across both local and planetary scales, and remain agile, highlighting ideas such as sortition, liquid democracy, and limited, human-centered uses of AI for deliberation and preference aggregation, while cautioning against techno-solutionism and emphasizing cooperation over zero-sum conflict.