Cesar A. Hidalgo

What is Augmented Democracy?

Augmented Democracy (AD) is the idea of using digital twins to expand the ability of people to participate directly in a large volume of democratic decisions. A digital twin, software agent, or avatar is loosely defined as a personalized virtual representation of a human.

Are you proposing to replace actual democracies by Augmented Democracy?

No. As I said in my TED talk, and I confirm here, my proposal is not to replace our current democracy with Augmented Democracy. My goal is to ignite a debate focused on expanding the design space of democracy. Democracy is a beautiful idea, but there are many ways in which it can be implemented.

How would one of these experimental “Augmented Democracy systems” work?

What an Augmented Democracy system would need to do is predict how each of its users would vote on a bill that is being discussed in that country’s congress or parliament. These predictions would provide an estimate of the support that the bill would have received if it had voted directly by the population of users of an AD system instead of their elected representatives.

Would such a system centralize too much data and power on the system’s architects?

In recent years we have all become well aware of important data privacy and monopoly concerns. These concerns involve primarily large platforms, such as the social media giants of today. These large platforms centralize large volumes of data, but they are not the only way to design an online system.

How different is Augmented Democracy from our current democracy?

As a matter of fact, Augmented Democracy can be identical to our current democracy, or quite different, if we so choose. Consider an implementation of Augmented Democracy where everyone has the same exact algorithm for his or her digital twin: an algorithm that simply copies the votes of the congressman that was elected to represent your district. In that case, we recover exactly our present-day democracy.