Welcome to the video on the future of E-democracy. This is the third video in the series on the E- democracy. In the previous videos, professor Oren Perez explained the concept of E-democracy and what it entails. He also showed us some practical examples and discuss the pitfalls and challenges.In this video, Professor Perez will explore some recent developments in the field, and assess the future of democracy. After watching this video, you are able to identify at least two futuristic ideas on the democracy, explained the drawbacks of the data analysis approach.And you will understand the potential of social box and the risks involved. Professor Perez has shown us the cyber optimism that dominated the field in the first years, has been replaced by a more somber appreciation of the limits of E-democracy in particular. We now understand that it is not enough to simply provide an opportunity to comment on regulatory drafts, in order to achieve significant public participation. The second wave of digital democracy was characterized by the emergence of more sophisticated tools such as, wikis and e petitions.But these new models do not provide satisfactory response to the challenges we identified. Welcome back Professor Perez, looking into the future and in relation to your research and studies.Can you give an example of one of the new tools suggested in the literature? >> As we've seen in the previous videos.The main challenge for democracy is to facilitate broader participation, and to increase the systemic quality of the deliberation process. One suggestion introduced recently by Livermore Edelman and grown, is to use advanced language processing tools.To extract more meaning from the royal corpus of comments received by regulatory agencies. Using AI tools, they were able to highlight the more significant comments from the large pool of comments.Using modern AI techniques such as topic modeling agencies can identify, subject matter categories in an and structured corpus. And exposed trends and themes still from a democratic point of view, this approach does not assist in improving the quality of the deliberation process. Another problem is that using AI to extract meaning from a large corpus raises concerns, regarding accountability, control and agency. >> I'm happy that you mentioned using AI because one of in your study you mentioned using AI, to support digital the ruling processes. Can you tell us a bit more about this idea? >> Another idea which I indeed developed in recent paper titled, collaborative the Rulemaking Democratic votes and the future of digital democracy.Is to use especially designed autonomous social votes, intelligent democracy votes to enhance the democratic capabilities of citizens.Leading to augmented democracy. While the term social votes has been recently used primarily in a negative fashion, the idea of democracy boat shows the positive potential of such autonomous agents. Autonomous social votes are designed to act in ways similar to how person might act in a social interaction. And E-democracy both can receive as input the political preferences and views of their principles.And according to them, participate on their behalf in digital consultation processes, exploiting sophisticated AI algorithms. Of course, citizens can invest in greater effort and participate themselves in some participatory processes, while leaving others to their social boat. Although current social both technology is not sophisticated enough to realize these visions, it seems that less sophisticated social boats, based on simple heuristics are within our reach. For example, and environmentalists can use social boats in order to adapt their opinion of the most reputable, environmental NGO that took part in the consultation.Alongside the positive potential of democracy boats. This technology raises various challenges. First, we need a reliable authentication mechanism that would enable agencies to distinguish between, legitimate boats used by authentic citizens and malicious ones. In addition, boats can be used to spread false information.Furthermore, the introduction of artificial agents into the deliberation process, can depend the polarization of the deliberative space.Wthout enhancing the systemic value of the comments. >> So hearing all this, can you tell us where we are now? >> As this module showed, the internet has great potential in enhancing participation in democratic processes and promoting open democracy. This understanding led to the first wave of E-democracy applications which was mainly based on notice and comment doctrine.Ie notifying interested citizens about the initiatives and allowing them to comment by email. This doctrine was implemented in the US regulations.gov website and in similar websites in other countries. However, despite the initial optimism, it became apparent as more experienced was gained.That getting people to participate in digitally mediated processes, and achieving an epistemological significant output constitutes a difficult challenge. This understanding led researchers to look for new approaches, such as using collaborative tools and combining online and offline interactions in a hybrid form. Further approaches, which are still at the experimental stage, are using data analysis and natural language processing.To enable the extraction of meaning from a large corporate of comments and the introduction of the democracy votes. >> Thank you so much, Professor Perez for offering some insights into the future of E-democracy to our learners at home. Maybe you could think of other ways to enhance substantial public participation in democratic processes. Use the discussion prompt to post your ideas, taking into account what you have learned this far. This was the last video in the module on E-democracy. I hope the content of this module has inspired you, to conduct your own research and democracy for now, thank you for watching and join us next time.
