“bUt In CaNaDa YoU vOtE fOr ThE pErSoN nOt ThE pArTy” 🤡

Regardless of what you think, you’re voting for a person in Canada, not a party. There’s a reason why the name is the one in bolder font and not the party!

Amidst understandable concerns of AI dystopia, no one is offering a positive vision for how we can use AI to remake our institutions and reinvent how we govern. That’s what I try to offer today. My argument is that we need an explicit research agenda to build “political superintelligence.” Here’s my case: AI makes intelligence cheap and widely available, just as the printing press made information cheap and widely available—and that earlier revolution ultimately reshaped governance and society to our benefit. To capture this benefit quickly, we need to build political superintelligence: a set of tools that help citizens, representatives, and institutions perceive the world more accurately, understand tradeoffs, contest power, and act more effectively. I divide this research agenda into three layers: 1. The information layer: AI can make voters and governments dramatically smarter, but only if we fix political bias in models, improve the quality of sources AI draws on, and build trust through better performance. 2. The representation layer: AI can serve as tireless delegates acting on our behalf in political processes—monitoring government, filing comments, flagging decisions—but only if we solve preference drift, adversarial vulnerability, and the fundamental problem that we don't own our own agents today. 3. The governance layer: Even if we get the first two layers right, the infrastructure sits inside privately controlled companies. We need binding constitutional frameworks that distribute power, constrain companies, and ensure political superintelligence serves citizens rather than executives or shareholders. Each of these layers has a concrete, tractable set of research questions: better evals, geopolitical forecasting as a test case, governance experiments at small scale, agentic simulations, and institutional designs modeled on centuries of constitutional thought. The window for building these structures is narrow, and the right response is not to slow AI down but to speed up how fast we build the institutions that keep us free as AI grows more powerful. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” I hope you’ll read the full piece (linked below), which serves as a sort of manifesto for the Free Systems Lab, and that you’ll join me in the defining political economy research question of our time.

Excited to share our new paper published in PNAS (joint with @SemraSevi and Don Green)! AI can enhance political knowledge and provide balanced information about politics with proper guardrails and vetted sources (e.g., party platforms). pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pn…

Prejudice is common in modern societies. Reducing that prejudice is difficult to do, particularly in a cost-effective and scalable manner. Can AI help solve this problem? My new working paper with @semrasevi, @mitchellbosley, and Crabtree examines this question! To do so, we created a chatbot who could have constructive, empathetic, and personalized conversations with people about prejudice towards marginalized groups. We experimentally tested whether having a short conversation with a chatbot can durably reduce transphobia. We find that our AI-mediated conversations significantly increased support for transgender rights across multiple attitudinal measures. However, follow-up data one week later revealed notable attenuation, suggesting that any gains may be transient without reinforcement.