When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the floor at the recent Liberal convention, he described a future where AI benefits all Canadians – not just a lucky few.

It’s an optimistic vision. But according to political theorist Hélène Landemore and democratic innovator Peter MacLeod, our current political system just isn’t capable of delivering on it. Instead, Landemore, a Yale professor and the author of Politics Without Politicians, argues that ordinary citizens – not politicians – should be the ones calling the shots. MacLeod has spent more than twenty years putting that idea into practice in Canada. His new book is Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs The Public.

Our conversation isn’t really about artificial intelligence. But it is about whether our current form of politics is capable of governing it – or whether a radical new technology demands an equally radical form of governance.

Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule, Hélène Landemore

Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Hélène Landemore

Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public, Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson

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Four years ago, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with a strange claim: he thought the large language model he’d been working on had become sentient. At the time, virtually no one took him seriously. (Including, it would seem, Google, who promptly fired him). But lately, it’s started to seem like Lemoine might have been on to something.

When I interviewed Geoffrey Hinton last year, he was pretty confident that artificial intelligence was already exhibiting signs of sentience. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has said that he can’t be sure that his chatbot, Claude, isn’t conscious.

But what exactly does that mean? A chatbot may be intelligent, but does it have a sense of self? And what would happen if it did?

These are the kinds of strange, mind-bending questions Michael Pollan wrestles with in his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness.

It’s the kind of book that raises more questions than it answers. But as Silicon Valley continues to flirt with the idea of building artificial consciousness – of designing machines that don’t just think, but feel – these are the kinds of questions we should probably start asking.

A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan

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Just a few years ago, it seemed like all anyone in AI wanted to talk about was existential risk – this idea that an artificial super intelligence could eventually break containment and destroy humanity. More than 30,000 experts signed an open letter demanding a pause on AI development; bills were drafted that would constrain the most powerful new models; and the “godfathers” of AI were travelling around the world, warning anyone who would listen that we were hurtling toward our extinction.

And then: we moved on. We started using AI for work, and school, and to plan our kids’ birthday parties. Collectively, we just stopped talking about the end of the world.

But Nate Soares didn’t move on. Last year, the artificial intelligence researcher wrote a book with Eliezer Yudkowsky called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. As you can probably tell from the title, the book is unequivocal: If we keep going down the path we’re on, it will almost certainly lead to the end of our species.

Now, not everyone is convinced of the arguments Soares makes. But if there’s even a chance he’s right, I think we need to hear him out.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

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