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Now it's time to bring in Bruce Schneier. He's the author of a brand new book, Rewiring Democracy, How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship. And you can see him on the stream as he zooms right in. Great to see you, Bruce. Tell me, what was your approach to this?
When did you realize a book had to be written about AI in the middle of expanding AI? You know, we started writing it about two years ago. It's a crazy process. We're writing things that we think of as future, and then they happen, so that we write them in the past. The AI is changing so many things so fast that we just wanted to get a handle on the whole of it.
So, how is it going to work in our democracy where there's open competition to push us forward? But it's clear, as much as we're competing with the Elon Musk and the Altmans, it's really together the Americans against the Chinese, correct? You know, I don't buy the arms race argument. I mean, this research happens in the open. I mean, like the deep seek model, which is the Chinese model that did so well because they couldn't get the good American chips.
All that research is public. We learn from that, they learn from us. It really is humanity as a whole building this technology. And you know In democracy, it's not just politics. We look at the legal system, we look at government administration, we look at writing laws, we look at citizens.
It's affecting everything. And we talk about fake news, but it's really a lot more than that.
So, with the democracy, you say that AI could help with legislation. How would it aid in the democratic process?
So we are seeing tools for AI to write legislation. You might think, oh my God, how can AI do that? But right now, lobbyists write legislation. And having something that is more impartial. That the legislator can use.
And again, don't think national, think local. Think state, think city. Like, no one has staff, no one has budget. Assistive tools will help people write legislation, and that's more democracy.
So how has it gone so far, do you think? You know, not great. A lot of that has to do not with the technology, but with the economic incentives. the uh the large uh companies building this For shareholders, not for society, means they're not great for democracy. We're seeing changes.
There's a model that came out of Switzerland, which is entirely public, non-corporate. Super interesting. Singapore has done one. France has a model for its legislators. I'm not saying we use those, but we as society can decide to build some alternatives.
And I think that's going to be interesting to watch.
So, so far, they say the US government seems to have approaching AI advancement. Not in a way like we did the Manhattan Project. They understand the need to win, and President Trump has put that in everybody, a bug in everybody's ear. And he hired the right people, and David Zachs, who's at the cutting edge of all this, and his speed dial is all the people that brought us this modern age of social media. Do you think that they get it?
Have this administration shown they get it? I think not. I mean, this is the opposite of the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was the government hires a bunch of people, puts them in a lab, and says, build a bomb in secret. This is being done by corporations, not by government.
So it is the opposite. The Manhattan Project was entirely regulation. This is zero regulation.
Something in the middle might be nice, where we get the benefits of both the market. And what the public can do that is not market focused. And we're not seeing that in the US. And so you would like to see the government work on a separate tract in private industry? You know, separate and with, right, that Swiss model was the Swiss government with ETH Zurich, with a major research institution.
And they built that together. I mean, that's not a replacement of corporate AI, but that is another. Example in the mix. And we had to figure out who to trust. And are we going to trust a model from a company we don't trust, a country we don't trust?
A lot of it is about trust and it's also about power. And I want to see this be democratizing and not further increased power.
So people want to be more efficient. Companies want to be more efficient. They're going to ask their model what they do and how they fix it, whether it's a dry cleaner or a restaurant or a manufacturing base. I understand that. But also that people are worried about jobs, where AI can do your job better for no money.
Should people be worried? Or should there be somebody cognizant of not AIing ourselves out of workers? I think the market will AI. Workers away, right? The market seeks efficiencies, it doesn't seek, you know, the benefit to society.
I think it's going to be a real problem. Think about apprentice-based professions, right? It's not plumber, it's lawyer, it's doctor, it's accountant, it's architect. Right, junior level positions. Will there'll be fewer of them at best?
I mean, I don't think there'll be none of them, there'll be fewer of them. And we need to figure out deciding what to do about that. These are hard questions. Remember, Andrew Yang talked about it. I mean, you might not agree with him, but he did talk about that when he was running for president.
And I want to see these conversations, they're hard to have. Because they're really about changing society, and we're not good at that. And what about robots? What about robots? I, for one, welcome my robot overlords.
I think that's harder. Great advances in robotics, doing working in factories, right? Amazon is going to increase robotics, but they've been in auto manufacturing for decades. We know how to deal with robotics, but it's going to be the same thing about job replacement and also. It might be ways they enhance humans.
It could not necessarily replace an attorney that make a human attorney better.
So we got to watch the way that goes. Would you say that we got to do this responsibly? There's a danger if we d develop this in a way that could be a hindrance not only to our democracy, but get more powerful, and they're going to be very soon be smarter than the humans, correct? You know, not in general. I don't think that they'll be more capable in some ways, right?
They might be faster than the humans, they might be more sophisticated in certain respects. And AI basically won a Nobel Prize last year for protein folding, a super esoteric. Mathematical task of the AI just does better. It's not smarter than us in general, but these specific tasks are what you really need to think about, not. General intelligence.
Tristan Harris, who's got the counsel for responsible human engineering, who's one of the foremost experts on this, he was in our studio. And you know him from Social Dilemma, talked about the addictive powers of these apps that we live on. Here he is talking about hacking. AI being able to simulate language. Our democracy, our society runs on language.
When you can hack language and manipulate language, code is language, law is language, contracts are language, media is language. When I can synthesize anyone saying anything else and then flood a democracy with untruths, this is going to exponentiate a lot of the things that we saw with social media. Which, you know, for your listeners, we were behind the film The Social Dilemma on Netflix, which really highlighted how if you let a machine that runs on viral information. uh your society can sort of spin out into untruths really, really fast. Is that a worry?
That's not an AI problem, right? That problem was true in 2016 with Russian propaganda before AI. AI exacerbates it, but it's not new. And the problem there is inauthentic humans.
So, we are going to need some way to know whether there's a human or a non-human at the other end of any communication. And we're going to have to solve that problem even without AI. How do you do that? I mean, there's got to be a demand. I mean, I don't know how you do that technologically.
Yeah, so I mean, there are ways to do it. I mean, some of the captures, you know, those captures you have to fill out to prove you're a human on websites. They work mediocrely. The question is: demand. I mean, this goes again to the market.
I mean, social media companies that thrive on engagement, which thrives on demand. division and outrage. I mean, they kind of don't want to get rid of those things because they're not profitable. Here again, governments can step in. These are hard problems.
We need to solve them. But I think they're more democracy problems than AI problems. Do you think this could help us out in the court system when people are looking for justice? I know a jury of your peers are a jury of your peers, but do you think it could help us expedite some with the backup in the courts? A lot of research of that.
And that's happening right now and weirdly in Brazil. Brazil is, I didn't know this, even more litigious than the United States. They have an enormous backlog. And the courts are using AIs not to make decisions, but to more efficiently make the process work. But you can imagine mediation by AI, right?
If you and I were in a contract relationship, we could put that on our contract today. Instead of going to a mediator, We fire up a chat bot, we each complain on text. And the AI makes a decision and we decide that it's binding. I think that's really interesting. I think there is going to be some of that in the same way we avoid the court system today and go to a human arbitration.
Is there a fear that they'll become your psychiatrist? I think so. We are seeing, and more generally, synthetic friends, artificial friends, parasocial relationships. Think this is a huge problem. I don't know how to solve it.
And yes, I am worried.
So, Bruce, people describe your book as an optimistic look. Do you think it's an optimistic look on the possibility of AI in democracy? Yeah, I think it's realistic. I think we're largely optimistic, but it comes down to the humans. If we as humans choose to use this technology for democracy, it will help democracy.
The same technology in authoritarian countries makes authoritarianism better, right? It's better for surveillance, it's better for. for social control.
So it's what the humans choose to do.
So, I need to be optimistic about the humans in our society. which makes me optimistic about them using technology for good. And Bruce, what do you use it for? I don't use it for much, right? I'm a writer.
That's what I do. I enjoy writing.
So, it never actually occurs to me. My students use it all the time. I try to get them to use it critically.
Sometimes I succeed. Are you able to tell what's their work and what's AI's work? I think I generally can. I think we all think we generally can. I'm sure some slips through.
You know, I'm okay if students use it as assistive tech. to a grammar checker is now AI. If they use it, I tell them: feed your essay and have it critique it. That's a good use of AI. Just don't have it right for you.
I think I can tell. They probably fool me. Bruce Schneider. Schneider, thanks so much for joining us. Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship gives you some great ideas.
Congratulations again, Bruce. Thank you. It's Will Kane Country. Watch it live at noon Eastern Monday through Thursday at FoxNews.com or on the Fox News YouTube channel. And don't miss the show.
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